Indelible Ink
Considerable time and effort goes into producing print copies of journals, both here at Nature and at other scientific publishers. It's something that pains my web publishing heart. Is print really necessary? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? If they do, are those benefits to consumers... or really just to us publishers? If we dropped print altogether could the savings fund a free bar at the next NPG xmas party?
Certainly print still has the edge over online in some situations. I'm a recent convert to the print version of Nature journal - it's far easier to browse bitty front half content (research highlights, news and views, book reviews) by flicking through pages than it is to navigate nature.com. It's also more aesthetically pleasing - the layout is nicer.
Nature and other magazine style journals are the exception to the rule though. I also read OUP's Nucleic Acids Research (have to keep a hand in...) but I've never felt the need to pick up a paper copy to browse in the bathtub. When a journal is all papers then a simple eTOC conveys everything you need to know, conveniently and efficiently.
Most consumers seem to agree. Last year a study in the excitingly named Serials Review by Chandra Prabha noted that the percentage of journals held by libraries that were only available online had jumped from 5% in 2002 to 37% in 2007. For every one researcher reading a paper on paper there are hundreds reading it online and the gap is even more pronounced if you only look at students and young postdocs.
When publishers talk about the article of the future - interactive figures, semantic markup, replicable workflows, aggregated conversation - they're talking electronic versions. Until journals come out on e-paper improvements are going to be restricted to articles online. Print is already the poor cousin when it comes to functionality: it's far easier to collect a citation, follow a reference, quote or use supplemental data from an article that you're reading online.
Costs are higher when you're maintaining print versions. Though print and online have the same workflow up to a point printing, binding, storing and mailing out journals isn't cheap (economically or environmentally). Nor is cataloging, shelving or building huge new extensions to your library to house your growing back catalog.
So given the costs, limitations and lack of consumer enthusiasm, why bother?
a brief disclaimer: I'm talking about scientific publishing in general, not Nature in particular.
Tax: is one slightly disappointing reason. In much of Europe VAT is higher on electronic items than on printed ones, so to remain competitive publishers simply bundle 'free online access' with a print subscription. In the Netherlands VAT is 6% on print and 19% on electronic items - it's potentially cheaper to buy a print subscription and then bin copies of the journal as they arrive (saving on shelving costs) than to buy online access alone.
Elsevier has noticed a migration to 100% e-only in countries like Sweden (where there are VAT exemptions or reimbursements) and a more gradual change in countries like the UK (where only particular libraries can reclaim some VAT).(from Elsevier Library Connect)
Fear of losing your subscriber base: the vast majority of a journal's audience is happy working online but what about the five percent of elderly, persnickety professors who eschew PCs and rely on paper copies? What if they're the same persnickety professors who sit on the board of the society whose journals you publish? What if you've already annoyed that society by suggesting that from now on their members won't get a nicely bound hard copy of the latest issue, simply an eTOC with links to ScienceDirect or some other mega-repository which has swallowed their brand and identity?
Prestige: Given the choice between being published on paper (hang the journal cover on your office wall, send your mum a reprint) or online only who goes for the latter? Journals that are printed also imply a broad readership. Ad buyers prefer paper too - despite (or perhaps because of? ;) ) the better measure of ROI you get from being able to track views and clickthroughs. Authors and advertisers may be a relatively small percentage of consumers... but they have a relatively large effect on a journal's bottom line.
Supposedly a solution to the first issue is forthcoming. The others I'm not so sure about.
Some further reading (from which most of this this post was cribbed):
The E-Only Tipping Point for Journals
Richard Johnson and Judy Luther
Comments
All of the factors you describe as helping to keep print alive as a scientific publication medium seem destined to disappear sooner or later.
Tax: as media touch the Web they immediately come under enormous pressure to become free to the consumer. Those publishers that will survive are those who embrace this simple concept rather than try to prop up the old, decaying system with giveaways.
Loss of subscribers: that 5% of paper junkies is dropping all the time. At some point it will be 1%. Is it really worth bending over backwards to accommodate this tiny, shrinking minority given cost, technological, and environmental pressures? There is a benefit to 'flipping through' journals - why not focus on replicating (and enhancing) that experience online?
Prestige: scarcity breeds demand. In information-saturated societies, attention is the most precious resource. I'd bet that most scientists would much rather know that the right people are finding and reading their work; they care much less about the idea of appearing 'in print'. The former leads to jobs, successful grant proposals, fruitful collaborations, and all of the things scientists need to survive. The latter is fluff that disappears rather quickly as a scientist's publication record grows.
Posted by: Rich Apodaca | May 15, 2008 03:07 PM
I know publishers like to forget this ever happens, but I think the linking of errata to the original article is one of the most useful features of electronic versions.
The paranoid also like to mention that print is necessary because once something is printed, it can't changed, and therefore no continual modification of the "official truth" according to the fashion of the times, political exigency, etc.
Posted by: Mr. Gunn | May 15, 2008 03:33 PM
You don't have a free bar at the Xmas party? Ouch...
Posted by: Michael | May 16, 2008 11:26 AM
Print on demand is making a mark on the traditional workflow. This is more the case at the moment for book printing. Many publishers still have large warehousing costs, and large offset print runs. At the moment for a book the economic cut off point is about 500 copies. If you need to make more than 500 copies it is more economically advantageous to go to offset printing. Less than 500 copies and it makes more sense to use print on demand services. (Most academic titles just sell on the order of hundreds of copies rather then thousands).
This has not impacted journals so much, especially full colour journals such as Nature, where the quality of print on demand is nowhere near good enough, but every year it is getting better. It's not too much of a stretch to see that the quality will become good enough at some point.
It is likely that people will always want to consume print products, the throwaway city newspapers that I hate so much are a terrible thing, but a good example of the seductiveness of tactile interfaces.
I could, however, see a future in which libraries hosted their own printing facilities, like the Espresso printing machine, which is on the order of magnitude of the size of a photocopier.
I don't know whether one could argue, for tax reasons, that one 'is' selling hard copies, were one to sell the right to a library to create hard copies, but the environmental benefit is pretty obvious to an approach such as this.
For somewhat related articles Peter Brantley writes about the current challenges print on demand in libraries, and Tim O'Reilly writes about the economics of digital distribution.Posted by: Ian Mulvany | May 19, 2008 10:10 AM