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The power of the linked environment

‘Joined-up’1 is a peculiarly British way of putting things, but it is actually a very good way of capturing the challenge that faces us when we look at scholarly publishing in the digital world, particularly for journals. An alternative formulation might be the need to re-establish coherence for readers of scholarly journals. The five-year process of moving individual journals or individual publishers to electronic status has now achieved critical mass, with thousands of journals available electronically. The arrival of the most prestigious scientific journals in electronic form has legitimized the medium and the only really major remaining issue preventing elimination of print versions for many journals is archiving (an issue returned to later). The elimination of distribution of printed journals does not mean the end of paper, of course. The evidence is that scholars browse online to decide what to read and print on demand from the electronic version to obtain a local paper copy for careful, intensive reading. The physical form is no longer filed because another copy can easily be printed out if required later. However, we are only beginning to understand the problems of moving the whole system of scholarly publishing to the digital world. There is much more to it than just transitioning individual journals to electronic form. The next challenge is to make the system work as smoothly in the digital world as it has done in print. Further, the key stakeholders – authors, readers, and libraries – have justifiably high expectations for the new network-based system. They do not just want it to mimic print – they want the new system to be better than print with all the navigability and customer service features they have become accustomed to on the web. Some of the useful features of the print system are proving difficult to capture or re-establish in the digital world. But some of the new possibilities opened up by digital publishing have no print analogue and therefore no suitable mechanism for dealing with them currently exists.