What is the situation of Sci-tech Journals in the digital age? The author recently saw an article in Aslib proceedings on March, 2001, Michael a mabe, "digital Mathematics: electronic challenges for the scientific journal publishers", which talked about the dilemma faced by scientific journals. The excerpt is as follows.

Sci-tech Journals always face various dilemmas, especially in the digital age.

The strategic dilemma of competition and cooperation

In the process from the author's contribution to the journal to the reader's reading of the journal, the former stage is characterized by competition and the latter stage is characterized by cooperation. Authors compete with each other to make their research results accepted by appropriate journals; Publishers compete with each other to provide suitable journals to excellent authors; Periodical agents compete with each other to supply the library with as many periodicals as possible, and their relationship with publishers is both competitive and cooperative. On the other hand, libraries cooperate with each other to meet the needs of readers who want to read and use all important journals. For academic journals, authors and readers are almost the same group, but their behavior patterns as authors and readers are very different. Focus on several key journals when submitting contributions; When reading, the more relevant literature, the better. So there are several big questions: where does the competition end in each link of the process? When did cooperation begin? Who needs to be met first? How to solve this conflict?

For publishers, meeting the needs of authors is a priority, because without good authors, there can be no later. They should strive to create journals that attract as many first-class authors as possible, and provide various journals that can cover the areas of interest of each reader group.

For the library, meeting the diverse needs of readers is the first. They want to order the necessary periodicals, but they don't want to deal with so many publishers. In the world of printed journals, they can deal with several agents. In the world of electronic periodicals, libraries and readers prefer an electronic periodical source and a platform with everything. But they don't want only one supplier! Therefore, some libraries began to cooperate with each other to share resources and establish their own platforms. Agents also gradually regard themselves as an honest intermediary. They have established an electronic journal center for libraries, which includes journals owned by multiple publishers.

The dilemma of electronic journal content

For traditional paper journals, the author only provides the paper text and some pictures. For electronic journals, the conversion between different operating systems and different programs will bring many problems, such as chaotic code of symbols and characters. It is up to publishers to solve these problems. In addition, it is also the task of publishers to add some links to the text, add computer-aided indexing and classification, and so on. If the transition to multimedia performance, the task of publishers is more important, because authors generally do not provide multimedia content.

Readers hope to obtain the above electronic enhancement services in electronic journals. But the author did not provide the corresponding things, what should we do? Is it feasible for people other than the author to do the relevant things? Can e-journals recover the cost of doing these things by charging more? From the experience of CD-ROM books in the past, it is impossible to charge more. The public is unwilling to pay a lot more for new functions in addition to the basic content price of paper products; It seems that it is wise to follow the golden rule that "content is the king".

The dilemma of meta content

Meta content refers to the unique information management problems of academic journals in the transition to digitization, such as what is first publication? Which version of a digital journal can be used as the final text for filing? How do readers meet their requirements for connectivity? How to manage citations in a non paper environment?

The author attaches great importance to publication priority. In order to meet this psychology, the electronic version of many journals is launched one or two months earlier than the printed version, but the cost of doing so is easy to make mistakes. When printing, relevant errors are often corrected. In addition, some contents of the electronic version are not available in the printed version because they cannot be printed. Since the journal is a "scientific memorandum", it is necessary to determine which version is the final version. There is no consensus in the scientific community on this issue, but the current practice is to prefer the printed version. It's hard to say how long this situation can be maintained and whether it should be maintained.

Due to the prevalence of electronic preprint communication, the concept of first publication has also been blurred. Is it subject to the date of submission of the preprint to the preprint database? Or is it subject to the date when the journal editorial department receives the "Manuscript"? There is no consensus in academia. However, a representative view is that the first publication date should be the date when the paper is first published (whether printed or electronic) after peer review and approval.

Readers want to freely exchange information and materials in various media, browse and use them, which requires a unified ID. Digital item identifier (DOI) is increasingly accepted. For example, Beethoven's symphonic works can give a unique number to represent the composer's originality, and then use other numbers to reflect whether its form of expression is music score, performance recording or performance video. The advantage of this system is not only that it has nothing to do with the media (unlike ISBN only applies to books and ISSN only applies to journals), but also that it is easy to trace who owns the intellectual property rights.

Even if DOI or similar system is adopted, the author will not give up the traditional citation method because it is clear at a glance. Therefore, someone needs to convert the original citation into DOI or other standardization system. The American Institute of scientific information or other citation processing and statistics units will face arduous challenges because a paper may be cited in various media.

To get out of the above dilemma, professional scientific and technological information personnel have a long way to go!