Anat Hovav
Abstract
Though e-publishing is relatively inexpensive, e-publisher survival still depends on the age-old virtues of content quality and author credibility.
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Cross Ref
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Index Terms
- Managing academic e-journals
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Reviews
Tom Stafford
As the title suggests, this paper is not going to be useful reading for much of the field of computing practice, though academics will find it useful. For academics, the paper will be particularly useful, since one of the authors (Gray) presently edits a well-known academic e-journal: Communications of the Association for Information Systems . The most useful aspect of the paper for me, as an academic, was the overview of Eisenhart's seven principles of e-publishing [1], with an eye toward describing the key reasons why e-journals do not have parity with print journals in the academic mind, most specifically with regard to tenure and promotion credit. As noted, it is far more economical and immediate to publish electronically, but the economics of journal publication have very little to do with perceptions, and the development of the perceptions of quality and rigor. It is the perception of quality and rigor that leads to reputational qualities that are considered beneficial for tenure and promotion purposes, and at the moment, our paper journals are too well entrenched to be displaced by e-journals. Many paper journals publish in parallel online, with electronic versions available as a convenience to members who subscribe to paper editions, but the time has not yet come when a Communications of the AIS or Journal of the AIS , each published exclusively online, will rank equally with a Management Information Systems Quarterly or a Communications of the ACM , each primarily a print publication that is also digitally accessible. It seems that we can't immediately change the journal publication process. And the key point made in this paper is well taken: there is no economic incentive to go electronic with our publication process. The quality of a journal is generally not reflected in its economic price, since key aspects of its economic costs (content production, peer reviewing, editorial supervision) are provided as a free service to the publication (though not necessarily as a free service, in an absolute sense, as those of us who justify our salaries based on the disciplinary service component of our jobs are well aware). This paper is the voice of experience, from those who are presently active in managing e-journals, on how and why e-journals still have work ahead of them to gain legitimacy in the paradigmatic world of scientific practice and publication. The authors never doubt that they will eventually gain full legitimacy, and they fully expect that it will be a long and difficult process, mediated by the sociology of science. Online Computing Reviews Service
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