The emergence of electronic publishing has evoked so much fear among print publishers that two years ago a representative of Oxford University Press, which publishes 154 scholarly print journals and a single electronic one, declared at a symposium: “I feel like a deer caught in the headlights of an onrushing truck.”
Predictor: Okerson, Anne
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Jacques Leslie writes about the movement of bringing scholarly journals to the Internet. He quotes Anne Okerson of the Association of Research Libraries. Leslie writes:”The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is one of about 450 electronic journals and newsletters that have come to life in the last few years, with many more in the planning stages. Of the 450, at least 70 are scholarly journals that accept articles only after they have been endorsed by experts in the appropriate discipline. In following this peer-review process, such electronic journals hope to attain the same legitimacy granted to their print cousins. Together, the electronic journals comprise what Ann Okerson, who follows the burgeoning field for the Association of Research Libraries, calls the greatest time of experimentation in publishing since the 1500s. ‘People have stopped saying, “I don’t know if the shift to electronic publication will really happen,”‘ Okerson says. ‘What they are now saying is, “This is really happening, and how will it change the way we work?”‘ And the journal industry is surprisingly substantial. American universities and research institutions subscribe to somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 academic journals, and sales in the US amount to between US$1.5 billion and $2 billion a year. Journals are the lifeblood of scientific, technical, and medical fields, in which they constitute the single most important means of conveying vital research findings. At the same time, the emergence of electronic publishing has evoked so much fear among print publishers that two years ago a representative of Oxford University Press, which publishes 154 scholarly print journals and a single electronic one, declared at a symposium: ‘I feel like a deer caught in the headlights of an onrushing truck.’ By now, some of that fear has been replaced by excitement over the possibilities that electronic publishing opens up, but the industry remains thoroughly unsettled. As Okerson says, ‘All the categories are shifting around as in a kaleidoscope.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Goodbye, Gutenberg: Pixilating Peer Review is Revolutionizing Scholarly Journals
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/ejournals_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney