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vice versa. For example, Communications of ACM's backlog for accepted individual
contributions in 2004 was reputed to be over two years.
3.4.4 Technical Limitations of Paper
For print journals, the medium is paper, which introduces the following technical
limitations:
Fo r m a t
—Printed work is limited by the properties of paper. For example, a mole-
cular biologist described the nightmare it was to publish an article with color figures.
Although finally published in color, the illustrations cannot readily be reproduced for
students, since the figures lose their meaning in a black and white photocopy
[9]
.
Distribution
—Distribution is costly, time consuming, and increasing in cost over
time. The publication process requires maintaining a distribution list, packaging,
mailing, and re-sending when necessary. Distribution cost is one factor, which leads
publishers to accumulate material into issues and only publish periodically.
14
Access
—In many cases, the access to published work is geographically and tem-
porally limited. Academicians subscribe to one or a few leading journals in their
field. To access other work, they normally go to the library in their school. Scholars
tend to read only the articles relevant to their area of interest and rarely read com-
plete volumes of a given journal
[3]
. To broaden the range of knowledge to which
they have access, academicians need access to specific parts of a variety of journals
and not just subscriptions to one or two journals. These issues are discussed further
in Section
5.1.2
.
Interactivity
—The lengthening time between when work is done and when it is
published shifted the role of journal articles from providing interactive communi-
cation among researchers to providing archiving and prestige mechanisms
[43]
.In
some disciplines, authors distribute preprints
[49,19]
as their primary means of com-
munication.
15
Other disciplines use the conference paper as a tool to disseminate and
communicate knowledge
[13]
. This issue is discussed further in Section
6.5.3
.
3.4.5
The Economic Challenge
The market for academic journals is shrinking, the price of academic journals is
increasing more rapidly than inflation and page counts are increasing
[40,52]
, yet
the budgets of libraries and universities are decreasing
[28]
. Libraries either drop
subscriptions or impose a freeze on new subscriptions
[28,30]
. As a result, the tradi-
tional publication outlets for new fields of research are usually limited. Survey results
14
Another reason is the reader's cognitive overload if articles are sent one at a time.
15
This method is not far different from the samizdat used in the Soviet Union for distributing political
knowledge among dissidents.
