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The contribution of electronic communication to science – Has it lived up to its
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2. Proceedings of the Second ICSU/UNESCO International Conference on
Electronic Publishing in Science
held in association with CODATA, IFLA and ICSTI at UNESCO House,
Paris 20–23 February 2001
The contribution of electronic communication
to science – Has it lived up to its promise?
Ana María Cetto
Instituto de Fisica, UNAM, Mexico
Abstract. Since their early beginnings, electronic
information and communication technologies have
promised to revolutionize the way scientists communi-
cate and publish their findings. And indeed, these tech-
nologies are having some significant impacts, and are
themselves experiencing changes that could hardly be
foreseen by the science fiction authors of recent times.
The various actors involved in science publishing are
responding with great dynamism to the opportunities
and challenges opened up by these advances. Not all
promises and expectations, however, are being equally
fulfilled. In this paper we critically discuss those that
relate to: i) the paperless and the wireless society, ii)
worldwide access to scientific information, iii) dropping
journal subscription costs, iv) organizing the informa-
tion chaos, v) democratizing the publishing media, and
vi) communicating with the broader public.
Introduction
Are fundamental shifts taking place in how we scientists
behave, organise ourselves, communicate and interact as a
result of electronic technologies? Is it true that we are wit-
nessing “a paradigm shift from the traditional, old fashioned
print publication system, directly descended from 15th cen-
tury Gutenberg, to a pioneering, telematic-based system of
science communication” [Brown, 1998]? Is this new powerful
system really aimed at meeting the needs of everybody, in-
cluding the traditionally “information-poor”? The answers
to such questions may have a crucial bearing on the scientific
enterprise and, more broadly, on the future of our relations
with society. However, often the debate is conducted on
parochial grounds, from the narrow standpoints of the indi-
vidual stakeholders, and the ensuing conclusions can hardly
serve the best interests of the scientific community, nor of so-
ciety and culture at large. By gathering a broader selection
Copyright 2001 by the International Council for Science,
UNESCO and individual contributors.
Paper number EPS02002.
The online version of the paper was published 20 June 2001.
DOI: 10.1244/02.eps2/002.2.00
of these stakeholders, the present conference provides an in-
valuable forum for the much needed collective reflection and
debate on these matters.
It is certainly too early to arrive at definitive conclusions,
as many important changes proceed at such a rapid pace.
The first indications from some studies, however, suggest
that a number of widely held assumptions about the na-
ture and prospects of “virtual society” in general need to
be revisited (see e.g. Woolgar, 2000) and, as we intend to
show here, this applies in particular to some of the promises
and assumptions made about electronic publishing in sci-
ence. Electronic technologies seem not always to affect us
to the extent or in the direction we imagined or we were
promised. For one thing, popular declarations that tech-
nologies will substitute for major social functions, contrast
with the finding that they more often augment existing prac-
tice. The possible directions of the internet, in particular,
are recognized to be strongly shaped by path dependencies
in technology, accumulation of economic and political power
and durability of social and cultural traditions. These kinds
of counter-finding should allow us to objectively distinguish
between the promise and the reality of life in the modern
communications era, and they ought to help us make more
realistic assessments of the advantages and potentialities of
the new technologies in the world of science.
21

3. 22 cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science
1. The Paperless and the Wireless Society
Both Alice and Elmont are homeless in Washington, DC.
Alice approaches Elmont who is sitting on a park bench,
to ask him if he’d like
to go for some soup. He tells her to be quiet as he is
scrolling through his email.
There is a pause, and then Alice asks, ’Don’t you need a
computer for that?’
Elmont replies, ’Possibly. Researchers still aren’t sure.’
Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip, February 1995.
Science fiction continues to inform future thinking. We
live in a future-oriented society, as Sally Wyatt [2000] notes:
“just as winners get to write (past) history, present-day ac-
tors attempt to write tomorrow’s history, largely as a way of
attempting to secure their current positions”. This is par-
ticularly true for the internet, which unleashes all sorts of
futuristic fantasy and speculation. But of course, history
still matters because it makes some futures more plausible
than others.
Not more than 20 years ago [Lancaster, 1982], the paper-
less society was promised to us — to scientists, in particular
— for the end of last century. And indeed in 1997 — barely
four years ago — there was suddenly a multitude of options
for electronic journal literature from primary and secondary
publishers, subscription agents and aggregators. Over the
previous decade many libraries in industrialized countries,
and a few in the rest of the world, had chosen to subscribe to
one or more abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, which
included the full text of articles in the database (either on
CD-ROM or via the Web), thereby simplifying the process of
providing their patrons with the journal literature. Progress
in providing the full electronic journals, however, had been
slower during that period; it had been noted that although
electronic products might offer more information and articles
than a library can acquire through print subscriptions, li-
braries seeking to replace their print subscriptions with elec-
tronic alternatives needed to consider that the options are
not necessarily equivalent [Ogburn, 1997].
Still today, the electronic and print versions of journals
are not necessarily equivalent, and there are good reasons
for making them different. Collection oriented academic re-
search librarians are thus faced with offering the convenience
of access to the content, at the possible expense of an archival
copy for future reference. According to a fairly recent study
[Vézina and Sévigny, 1999] most actors in the world of schol-
arly documentation (authors, editors, librarians and readers)
seem to agree that the printed copy is still useful and should
be kept for a long period of time (if not forever), whilst the
electronic version has become essential and should be used
also to develop new services for end-users.
To this one should add other obstacles and constraints
that make of electronic archiving and preservation of sci-
entific material a still unresolved issue, such as: the non-
existence of some relevant titles in electronic form [e.g.
Brown, 1998], the lack of technical support and reliable
electronic infrastructure, and the uncertainty faced by li-
braries and end-users about future access – even to previ-
ously paid subscriptions. Under such circumstances, the
transition from the paper to the digital world sounds as
hardly realistic.
In addition, there are day-to-day practical obstacles: li-
braries seem to resent having a mix of titles forced on them
in a bundle which includes the publishers’ main titles, and
having to cope with a variety of search protocols and au-
thentication systems required by different distributors. So
we see that even the big commercial publishers offer e-mail
alerting services that send journal tables of contents directly
to a reader’s PC, “to provide the very latest information
on soon-to-be-published papers and thus allow readers to
reserve issues in their library” [Elsevier, 2001].
There is, furthermore, some debate about the future pro-
liferation of interface devices: a world in which the computer
remains the dominant interface is seen as a North American
one; whereas a world with a multiplicity of access devices
looks more European, and a world with an uncertainty as to
access at all is still the dominant perspective in most other
countries around the globe. This raises different questions:
What kinds of services will work well on what kinds of de-
vices, at what costs, and for whom? Content is increasingly
becoming tied in with access means; how will it be offered
and/or sold?
And then, at a time when paper still does not show signs
of disappearing, comes the new technological generation,
that of the mobile or cellular phones and wireless communi-
cations based on packet switching, with its alluring promise
of a worldwide instantaneous information distribution that
recognizes no geographical or physical barriers. “People are
going to stop carrying around things like laptops”, it is said
[Marks, 2000]; more and more devices are going to fit in your
pocket. Indeed, we should not be surprised to see some lap-
top owners shifting to i-mode communicators pretty soon.
Yet even for the community of scientists and scholars, who
admittedly have been quite privileged in terms of modern
communications, it is difficult to imagine that such expen-
sive wireless communications will be made worldwide avail-
able in the near future. And, one should further ask: What
about those who never had a laptop – or who have lived in
an essentially paperless world? Would they be expected to
double-leapfrog into this new paper- and wireless society?
Although many of the aforementioned constraints may
be just transitory, it is becoming clear (once more) that new
technologies tend to supplement rather than replace or cor-
rect existing practices and organisations. Against the com-
mon assumption that electronic technologies supersede ex-
isting activities and arrangements, research shows that the
new technologies tend to be used in addition to, and along-
side, old ones. The much boasted “paperless office” seems
more illusory now than a few years back.
2. Worldwide Access to Scientific
Knowledge and Information
The web environment introduces in principle a new di-
mension in scientific communication and information, by
functioning as a giant network that lends itself to linking

4. cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science 23
Table 1. Internet facilities in five African countries with over 500,000 telephone lines, and in Somalia with less than 10,000
telephone lines. (a) data for 1999 [ISC, 2000]; (b) data for 1998 [ISA, 1998]
Country Int. hosts(a)
Int. subscr.(b)
Population (M)(b)
GDP/Cap.(b)
South Africa 167,635 650000 44.31 2979.0
Tunisia 33 30000 9.34 2144.0
Algeria 200 2000 0.08 1442.0
Morocco 2,034 75000 27.87 1218.0
Egypt 2,355 100000 65.98 1195.0
Somalia 2 50 10.63 169.0
people, documents and data, individually and in groups.
Web-based community services are offering a plethora of ap-
pealing facilities. Scholars are becoming attracted by the
idea of accessing information from their own desktop on a
twenty-four hour basis, with instant local printout, immedi-
ate updating of information, modern navigational facilities
and a general saving in time.
There is talk of the “empowerment” of the scientist as end
user [Brown, 1998], whilst the librarians’ role is seen increas-
ingly as that of a support service for the most efficient way
of providing users with the information they want. There is
no need to buy all the content of a particular journal because
only a small proportion of the articles is required by every
scientist – to whom the library budget could probably even
be devolved, as part of this empowerment process.
Surfing the net with the purpose of identifying information-
rich sources of data has become indeed a growing feature of
end-user behaviour. However, this is not to say scientists are
fully using the advantages of the electronic tools and tech-
nologies to communicate scientific knowledge (aside from the
use of personal e-mail communication for this purpose); the
electronic means serve rather for distribution and access to
otherwise print publications (preprints, papers and reprints)
and to data banks. In fact, there is still little clarity about
the extent to which scientific knowledge — as distinct from
scientific information and data — can be communicated by
such means. The experiences with long-distance education
and communication with other sectors will probably provide
useful insight into these matters.
Further, it is not certain that the net with all its services
that are to a large extent public at present (including the
use of email, which is by far the most frequent activity via
the net) will always be there for free. The signs are that
the current rate of straightforward rapid expansion of inter-
net usage will not continue [Woolgar, 2000], and there are in
fact some early indications of fatigue and disenchantment [El
País, 2000]. Large numbers of young people – including stu-
dents – have stopped using the internet, in those countries
where usage has been more intensive; it has ceased being
a novelty and people look for less virtual ways to commu-
nicate, read, play, or go shopping. Of course, those former
users who can afford it, may “come back to” the internet,
perhaps with the third-generation mobiles. But the fact is
that on the whole, the internet has a commercial orienta-
tion and is mostly used for the search of merchandise, trips,
entertainment and general information; its success is tightly
linked to the expected commercial profits, which lately have
shown clear signs of dwindling.
On the other side, there are still those who have never
used the internet: at present (January 2001), whilst 90% of
internauts are in industrialized countries, and 57% of them
in North America (US and Canada), barely 1% are in Africa
and the Middle East. For scientists and scholars, the dis-
tribution of percentages does not seem to be substantially
different.
Table 1 gives a rough idea of the situation in Africa re-
garding internet facilities, both in the only five countries
having in 1998 over 500 000 telephone lines, and in the one
country which had less than 10,000 telephone lines [ISA,
1998]. Still in 1999, Liberia and Sudan reported no internet
hosts, and another ten countries around the world had only
one host [ISC, 2000], whilst in the USA there were over 53
million of them.
We should not forget that internet connection still re-
quires a telephone line, and at least 80% of the world pop-
ulation does not have access to one. In dozens of countries
there is less than one line for every 100 inhabitants, and most
of these countries are in Africa. In Cameroon, Mozambique
and Tanzania, there was in 1998 only one institution with
email access, with no connection to the library. At a univer-
sity in Algeria with only one email terminal, staff members
were expected to type their message on diskette and give
them to the system administrator to be sent. Often in these
countries the access modem is extremely slow and the server
is very busy, which makes it difficult to download material
from the internet.
Financial constraints on widespread use of the internet are
evident. In several countries in Africa and Asia, university
authorities give restricted net access to heads of department
or senior staff via shared terminals “because dial-up access
is expensive” [Lund, 1998]. Communications in countries in
Africa with a very low average income level can be even more
expensive than in rich countries, with local call charges cost-
ing more than US$4.-/hr in Guinea, Mauritania and Sierra
Leone [ISA, 1998].
Political and other external events may also have a disas-
trous effect on communication facilities in some developing
countries: for instance, during the political crisis in 1997
the internet system in Sierra Leone University became com-
pletely inoperable because the system’s operators had fled
to nearby countries.
The sentence so often pronounced by aid agencies and

5. 24 cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science
their consultants, to the effect that “computers and telecom-
munications... provide an unprecedented opportunity for
rapidly narrowing the gap between the information rich and
the information poor” [e.g. Lancaster, 1984], is a persistent
fallacy. The most we can expect is that they narrow the
gap “between the information rich in the West and their less
well-informed equivalents in the Third World” [Olden, 1987],
allowing the latter to become part of the globalized informa-
tion elite. In some countries in Africa, where literate people
have always been an elite, computer-literates and those they
serve will be a super-elite.
In addition, one should bear in mind that often the use
of high technology in less developed countries produces new
forms of dependence rather than enlarging independent ca-
pacity. Which is not to mean that Africans and people from
other developing countries do not need the new information
technologies: they do, but of the kind that local information
professionals and users can understand, maintain, nurture,
develop and ultimately internalize [Tiamiyu, 1989]. This
applies in particular to the use of the new electronic tech-
nologies in science; we shall come back to this point under
section 5.
3. Dropping Journal Subscription Costs
Last but not least, there are those who, even being con-
nected, cannot afford to pay for the information, and who
apparently constitute a growing group.
Indeed, for many scholars electronic publication has failed
to address the problem of accessibility: one of its promises,
lower costs (irrespective of who has to pay them in the end),
has simply not happened. There are strong indications, in
fact, that consumers – scholars, their libraries, and their
institutions – are paying for the development of electronic
versions of scholarly information [Create Change, 2000].
It is useful to recall that as late as the 1960s, scholarly
communication was still part of an academic tradition. It
was a manageable system, in which academics reported their
discoveries, scholarly societies added value by vetting publi-
cations for quality, editing and publishing them, and libraries
did most of the disseminating of the results. Then came a
period of enormous growth in the scholarly and educational
environment, first and foremost in industrialized countries
and later, to a lesser extent, in most of the rest of the world.
The pressure on faculty to publish and to get research sup-
port through grants also increased, and the quantity of re-
search grew beyond the capacity of the scholarly publication
system.
Commercial publishers then entered the scene, and began
to absorb an increasing share of scholarly publication. With
this stimulus, existing journals expanded and new journals
were formed to accommodate the growing quantity of re-
search in increasingly specialized areas. At the same time,
information was starting to be viewed as a commodity that
could produce profits for commercial publishers. Not-for-
profit publishers began to see commercial publication as a
way to manage precarious finances and weak publishing in-
frastructures and get rid of high overhead operations while
still retaining quality control. Faculty were happy to see
their chances to win tenure and promotion enhanced through
publication and through appointment to editorial boards.
The whole sense of journal publishing changed as scientists’
interest shifted away from the readers’ end and closer to the
authors’ end.
But already in the late 1970s there were the first signs
that this scholarly communication system had to be main-
tained at a high cost, and by the mid-1980s cancellations of
journals and reductions in other kinds of library purchases
took place in many libraries. A chronic cycle started: can-
cellations caused higher prices and higher prices drove more
libraries to cancel more journals. The dramatic increases
in journal costs of scholarly publishing have in fact reduced
scholars’ access to essential research resources all over the
world. Libraries simply cannot afford to keep up with the
costs for commercially published journals, which are typi-
cally three to seven times as high as society or not-for-profit
journals. A few recent figures most of them taken from [Cre-
ate Change, 2000] may serve to illustrate the situation.
Though the number of journals published worldwide has
doubled in the last fifteen years, North American academic
research libraries actually reduced their journal acquisitions,
on average, by over 6% during the same period. During
the twelve-year period ending in 1999, the unit cost of li-
brary subscriptions to scholarly journals increased by 9.0%
per year (leading to a cumulative of 206%, in contrast to the
52% increase in USA consumer prices). Interlibrary borrow-
ing among North American research libraries shot up 122.2%
for the period 1989–1999 (8.3% annually); this increase sug-
gests that scholars are having to depend on access from other
libraries more and more.
Similarly, a recent report from Australia documents a
43.7% decline in total journal subscriptions for 38 university
libraries between 1993 and 1998. During one recent year,
24 Canadian libraries cancelled $4.34 million (Canadian) in
journal subscriptions.
The central library system of UNAM in Mexico, one of
the largest university libraries in Latin America, has been
forced to cut journal subscriptions, and book acquisitions
by an even larger percentage, despite a considerable bud-
get that has increased year by year. Librarians have been
subject to pressure to buy electronic subscriptions in addi-
tion to the corresponding print versions, plus subscriptions
to new electronic-only titles. It soon turned out that the
titles offered initially for free or at low cost became expen-
sive. Yet the library system has made an effort to maintain
subscriptions to as many titles as possible, as academic staff
and students are expecting to benefit from the conveniences
offered by digital journal libraries and databases. For the
time being, the ongoing changes in these services, merging
of companies, appearance of new aggregators, etc., are re-
sulting in frequent deficiencies in the provision of services to
the end-user, despite the high costs paid.
Scholarly communication has become indeed an impor-
tant business for commercial publishers, and mergers cause
prices to rise even higher as competition decreases. Since
1995, eleven of the most expensive STM (science, technol-
ogy and medicine) journals have shown a yearly increase of
10.6%; a library subscribing to just these eleven titles cur-
rently pays out $86,000 per year. The margin for commer-

6. cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science 25
cial scholarly publishers is far higher than the median for all
publishers, which is around 5% per year. The scientific and
medical divisions of these companies seem to be the most
profitable, with one company’s science division operating
with a 35–40% margin. Only the arts and humanities, where
non-commercial publishers still dominate, regularly posted
gains of less than 10% per year during the past decade.
There is a perception among some librarians that publish-
ers of scientific journals could readily reduce their subscrip-
tion prices by selling advertising. However, as remarked by
Tagler [2000], advertisers speak with their spending power,
and also their funds are limited. The majority of scholarly
research journals have low circulation levels in the range of
400 to 1500, with an international spread of readers and with
most of the subscriptions sold to libraries; hence their little
chance of having a significant advertising revenue stream.
Although there is still new ground to be covered in explor-
ing the possibilities of web advertising, there are no strong
reasons to believe that it will help to substantially reduce
subscription prices of electronic journals having a limited
readership.
The other side of the coin is no less dramatic: most
learned societies have faced steady declines in library sub-
scriptions during the past twenty years or more, at a rate
of roughly 3% per year [Langer, 2000]. This is starting to
force scholarly societies to revise their editorial policies and
to reevaluate the roles of their journals and of the societies
themselves.
This situation has its cruel ironies: universities pay to
subsidize faculty research and then pay huge sums of money
to buy the results back in the form of published content. A
group of French specialists [Seminaire Villeurbanne, 1997]
argues that “we should answer ourselves the following, ac-
cording to the nature of the text (commercial or not): Does
the author write with the idea of selling his text? Is there a
potential market ready to buy his text? If the answers are
in the negative, it would be convenient for him to either pay
for the publication, or post it as a preprint, or distribute it
by electronic means to the potentially interested persons.”
Probably much effort and money could be saved if our sci-
entists and their institutions undertook a serious revision of
the purpose of publishing. The scholarly and scientific com-
munities are starting to respond in a more or less organized
way to the present critical situation, not by undertaking such
revision but at least by subjecting a variety of alternatives
to discussion or promoting their implementation, such as
[Create Change, 2000]; see also [Shulenburger, 2001]:
• Creating competition to commercially published jour-
nals
• Creating more venues for scholars to communicate
outside of commercial publications
• Supporting the self-publishing programs of scholarly
societies
• Fostering alternatives to the current practice of sur-
rendering intellectual property rights to publishers
• Fostering changes in the faculty peer review system
that will promote greater availability of scholarly re-
search: these changes might include movement away
from quantity and toward quality as a criterion for
tenure and promotion.
The purpose of such initiatives is to help scientists re-
gain control of the scholarly communication system and to
make research as accessible as possible to scholars all over
the world, to their students, and to others who might derive
value from it, on the basis that scholarly communications
should continue to be treated as public goods and not be
left to the market forces.
In this connection, it is estimated [Steele, 1998] that the
diversion of just a small proportion of the annual purchasing
power of the libraries of universities in industrialized coun-
tries could create and fund on a recurrent basis the neces-
sary academic electronic information/article data banks. A
related concern has led to important efforts to provide free
access to literature and data, such as the well-known Pub
Med system in the medical field, or the Public Library of
Science [PLS, 2001], a project launched with the support of
scholars and editors for online public libraries of science to
provide unrestricted free access to the integrated and inter-
linked archives of scientific research.
4. Organizing the Information Chaos
There are of course other arguments in addition to the
financial ones, for undertaking a serious revision of the pur-
pose of publishing. Before the emergence of the internet,
in the late 60’s, there was a widespread concern among sci-
entists and editors caused by the rapid (incorrectly called
exponential) growth of the number of papers and journal ti-
tles, and a few attempts were made to bring some order and
rationality into the picture by merging certain titles and can-
celling others. Then, however, came the apparently limitless
possibilities opened up by the modern technologies, which
somehow interfered with those good intentions. Against
many odds, scientific journals have continued to proliferate
– at a much greater pace than the number of scientists–, be-
yond any planning and without responding to any strategy.
Do we know, does anybody know what scientific journals
are there for? Have science historians, sociologists of sci-
ence, information scientists, reached any clear conclusion –
or has at least any user group evaluated scientific periodical
use systematically over a long period of time?
Under the present financial strain, referred to in the pre-
vious section, differences in values among key actors in the
scholarly publication system have become more clearly man-
ifest. Stead [1997] refers specifically to the different views
held by scientists and librarians – not to speak of commer-
cial publishers – of the role that journals play in the process
of scholarly communication: whilst scientific societies’ stated
top priority is to preserve the archival record or research in
their disciplines, a more cynical view is that these journals
are principally a service to scientists in their quest for tenure,
promotion and grants.
Indeed, a large number of papers are published as a re-
sult of the authors’ necessity to be seen to be active and

7. 26 cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science
productive, as opposed to their genuine desire to communi-
cate new, original and useful research findings. There can be
little doubt that the primary stimulus behind this excessive
publication remains the pressure to publish experienced by
academics. A study based on a survey of over 200 journal
editors in the areas of geology, physics, sociology and in-
formation science [Anderson, 1997] found a high percentage
of editors reporting fragmented publications (84%) in the
physical sciences and duplicate articles (81%) in the social
sciences – despite guidelines for authors normally warning
against submittal of excessive articles. Studies as this one
show that excessive publication is an issue of current and,
apparently, growing concern within the editorial process.
It is largely admitted that huge numbers of articles pub-
lished in science journals are probably never read by anyone,
yet scientific societies seem to care little about this. Consider
the following statements of the American Chemical Society:
• Journal publishers have had to increase the number of
pages published and add new titles,
• Science journals, embodying the permanent archive
of science, must not respond to the vagaries of the
marketplace,
• Any loss of subscriptions causes a proportionate in-
crease in the cost of the remaining subscriptions,
• If science journals fail, a vital archival resource may
be lost, and
• For scientific society publishers... the mandate re-
mains clear: the archives of science must contain all
the quality research within the discipline that is vali-
dated for the record by peer-review and publication.
Whatever their reasons for wanting all this research pub-
lished, scientists and librarians are at cross purposes; the lat-
ter have no business buying articles that their students and
faculty do not need. One could ask, with Ginsparg [1996],
“do publishers add so much essential ’added value’ that we
should all be willing to pay big bucks for it?”
One could further ask: Must every paper be treated
equally? Just as libraries decide which publications are im-
portant enough to be held locally and which can be made
available through interlibrary loan or electronic access, so
would scientific societies and institutions do well to decide
what to publish and what to maintain some other way.
In today’s liberal economy, the market tailors products to
what the research libraries can (hardly) afford. But who says
that these products are adequate? Researchers, librarians
and scientific societies should work jointly to develop better
and more cost-effective systems of scholarly communication,
supported by the modern electronic tools, so as to guarantee
a satisfactory response to this question. For a large part
of the international physics community, in particular, the
electronic preprint archives are a partial but important step
in this direction. Some researchers, notably in the fields of
string theory and condensed matter, argue that they do not
read refereed journals any longer for research purposes, since
everything they need to know is published in the respective
e-print archive [Langer, 2000].
Other such preprint servers have been put in place, but it
is not yet evident that the same solution – which some qual-
ify as being “subversive” [Harnad, 1997] – will work in all
scholarly disciplines. Even among physicists, many believe
refereeing is a good thing because manuscripts are improved
and bad papers are filtered out. Yet the archives have in-
troduced a healthy degree of flexibility and openness that
certainly has been lacking in the environment of established
journals.
What will further happen to the organization of scientific
material as we continue to migrate to the internet? Accord-
ing to Pullinger [1998] the “journal” in the future will be the
following, all at once:
• an information store of scientific data,
• an articulated editorial policy,
• a means of accessing information,
• a long-term archive so that scientists of the future will
still have access to this information,
and this type of journal will live on because it is at the
core of the conduct of science; it gives content to preprint
servers, data bases, and more traditional products, depend-
ing on what the scientists want. The various goals of sci-
entific publishing, namely: communication of the latest re-
search, an archive of information and data, a record of scien-
tific endeavour, claiming precedence in discovery, and career
development, could all be improved, Pullinger argues, if they
were not part of a journal. One thing electronic publishing
has already begun to do is to unbundle these items. But
how far will it go?
Scientists (especially in the exact and natural sciences) do
not publish journal articles to communicate with disciplinary
colleagues; personal communication, e-mail, e-prints, tele-
phone, fax and meetings are much more important for this
purpose. Also, they do not regularly read journal issues,
which offer a miscellanea of papers of little direct interest to
any single reader. Nevertheless, scholarly literature is a spe-
cific kind of cultural good that must be organized and stored
for future purposes. It may be that eventually, some fraction
of the presently little used material will prove of substantial
import – just as has repeatedly happened in the past [Abel,
1999].
Meanwhile, as noted earlier, librarians still face a seem-
ingly relentless growth in the number of new and increasingly
specialized journals. They are charged exorbitant rates on
the grounds that they are read by many people [Chapman
and Webster, 1993]. It is libraries, pressed by their aca-
demic colleagues, which provide the bulk of the circulation
for journals and assured profit for the publisher.
Recommendations from academic staff, evidence from
user studies, bibliometric analyses, subscription costs, are
of course among the important factors in assessing the value
of scholarly and scientific journals [Anderson, 1997]; but all
these are not sufficient in themselves. A revision of academic
organization and evaluation practices and research policies
should contribute to devise more rational scholarly com-
munications systems and orient their future development.

8. cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science 27
These are important questions which require strategic con-
sideration and a long-term approach.
As observed in the Introduction, in addition to supple-
menting existing “real world” activities the new technologies
can actually stimulate more of them. Just as internet ver-
sions of virtual museums tend to generate more visitors to
actual museums, it turns out that the online publication of
academic articles leads to an increase in subscriptions [Wool-
gar, 2000] and in the number of journal titles. At the same
time, the new electronic technologies promise to make or-
ganisation more real in that they afford, in principle, the
means of tracking and recording interactions and patterns
of communications and relationships. However, this does
not seem to be happening yet: whilst new electronic infor-
mation providers are extending their information coverage,
librarians face a confusing and bewildering scene of elec-
tronic subscriptions offers and packages, and scholars need
to spend time on the web to research vast amounts of data
and information online, offered in a large variety of formats
and services. It seems that the electronic technologies have
progressed at a much greater pace than the information sci-
ences applied to publishing and communication.
We recall that from early studies of cross-citing amongst
journals in different disciplines [Narin et al., 1972], a series
of models of the interrelationship of these journals was de-
veloped; the separate disciplines appeared to relate to each
other in an orderly manner, as had been noted earlier by
de Solla Price [1969] and Brooks [1971], who referred to the
“full interwoven fabric of science”. Within disciplines, the
journals were seen to form fully transitive hierarchies with
very few relational conflicts. It was further observed [Car-
penter and Narin, 1973], again using cross-citing, that the
journals can be grouped into clusters that are easily iden-
tified as sub-disciplinary subject areas. To the extent that
they reflect the mosaic of (accepted) scientific knowledge,
such citation analyses can be useful tools for the structuring
of literature, provided they are used along with other scales
to obtain useful or meaningful results [Garfield, 1977].
Modern technologies considerably facilitate carrying out
more comprehensive informetric analyses, in addition to al-
lowing the development of new powerful tools and methods
to organize and relate scientific information and documen-
tation. Hyperlinks are already common within the internet
culture, and the packaging of articles within journals may
decline in importance in the near future [Brown, 1998]; the
digital world and the internet offer new functionality and
packaging possibilities, which hopefully will be used to build
a more rational and organized publications system in science.
Again the example set by physics is worth mentioning
here: the merger of the refereed APS journals with the e-
print archive is expected to produce a powerful and cost-
effective system with the help of the modern informatics
tools. So good for physics as published in the APS journals;
but, as noted before, the various scientific disciplines consti-
tute a full interwoven fabric of science, which is continuously
evolving, and it is therefore necessary to build flexible hor-
izontal bridges that connect the large and increasing body
of scientific literature in an orderly way. And this means
linking intelligently not just among the literature produced
today, but also with the literature of the past – including
that which is not on the web or which is not published any
more – because at this early stage there are already a num-
ber of electronic-only journal titles that have ceased to exist
[Chartron, 1999].
5. Worldwide Opportunities for Publication
Bill Gates, chief executive officer of by far the largest soft-
ware manufacturer in the world, predicted in 1995 that “the
information highway is going to break down barriers and may
promote a world culture, or at least a sharing of cultural ac-
tivities and values” [Gates, 1995]. More recently, Teledesic
Corp., created by Gates and McCaw in 1990, announced:
“On Day One of service – scheduled for 2004 – Teledesic will
enable broad band connectivity for businesses, schools and
individuals everywhere on the planet. It will accelerate the
spread of knowledge throughout the world and facilitate im-
provements in education, health care and other crucial global
issues” [Teledesic, 2000]. What is the “world culture” to be
promoted? Whose knowledge will be spread? Who decides
the ’crucial global issues’? The experience with the trans-
lation of the Encarta Encyclopaedia for different “markets”
forced Bill Gates to admit that “reality can be subjective”,
that language is not the only relevant parameter because
countries and cultures have different interests and interpre-
tations.
In fact, information and communication, and the tech-
nologies used, are by their very nature cultural. As noted
by Keniston [1998], “the content of software is determined
not only by the language, but by deep, underlying, usually
implicit and unacknowledged (because thought to be ’nat-
ural’) assumptions inherent in the software itself. Software
carries with it a view of the world, of people, of reality, of
time, of the capabilities of users, which may or may not be
compatible with any given and social context.”
As is well known, the internet is overwhelmingly American-
based, English-speaking, and Western-focused. In January
2000, roughly 73% of the estimated 72.4 million host com-
puters were in the US, 80% in English-speaking nations and
more than 90% of the internet operated out of Western coun-
tries [ISC, 2000]. As to the online language populations,
in December 2000 English dominated with 47.6%, followed
by Japanese with 9.6% and Chinese with 7.6% [GIS, 2000].
These distributions are very different from the distribution of
languages around the world, which population-wise is domi-
nated by Chinese in the first place, followed by English and
further by Spanish in the third place with 6%. Of course, the
distribution of languages in science is again very different,
English being by far the dominating one. As an illustration
of recent trends in the use of languages in science, Table 2
shows the breakout by language of papers published in the
physical sciences.
The uneven use of local languages in science is of course
not exclusive of the internet, but is being accentuated by it.
More generally, the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity
that is occurring among social systems, is exacerbated by
technical systems. Among colleagues and peers there has
been a gradual acceptance of the use of English as lingua

9. 28 cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science
Table 2. Percentage distribution of document languages,
taken from Physics Abstracts. Data for 1990-1991 and 1995–
1996 [Cetto, 1997], for 2000 [Physics Abstracts Online, 2000].
The INSPEC database contains an average of 173,000 doc-
uments for the biennium 1990–1991, 178,500 for 1995–1996,
and 225,300 for the year 2000
Language %1990–1991 %1995–1996 %2000
English 94.0 96.8 93.2
Japanese 1.4 1.0 1.7
Russian 1.3 0.2 0.2
Chinese 1.2 0.9 3.4
French 0.8 0.3 0.2
German 0.7 0.4 0.6
Korean 0.2 0.3 0.4
Spanish 0.1 0.0 0.1
Portuguese 0.0 0.0 0.0
Other languages 0.3 0.1 0.2
franca and at least for the foreseeable future there is little
reason to expect any change in this trend, as illustrated in
Table 2.
However, in addition to international communication
among peers, there is communication with students, teach-
ers, professionals, technicians, and with the broader public,
which ideally should involve the local languages as they
are best suited for a full comprehension. As noted by Ein-
stein [1941], “The mental development of the individual and
his way of forming concepts depend to a high degree upon
language. This makes us realize to what extent the same
language means the same mentality”. Further, to be relevant
a contribution to the growing body of doctrinal knowledge
must be woven into the fabric of existing knowledge, and
the writer must use the language conventions of his or her
audience [Foucault, 1972].
Precisely because countries and cultures have different in-
terests and interpretations, as well as different needs and
resources, the internet can become a helpful tool globally
only to the extent that it is used worldwide for the dissem-
ination of (locally produced) information. But the alleged
’worldwide’ opportunities for publication in science are only
very gradually being exploited here and there. There are no
surprises: communities having a limited capacity to publish
printed journals (besides having a limited access to informa-
tion), can hardly show a strong capacity to publish electron-
ically.
It is not necessary to recall that a small group of countries
comprising 20% of humanity account for over 90% of the in-
ternationally recognized scientific production (see Table 3).
These countries are also the more technologically advanced
and are therefore at great advantage when it comes to pub-
lishing and distributing the results of their scientific pro-
duction. Scientists who are not connected to the net are ex-
cluded automatically from publishing in a growing number of
journals. Further, the new ICT (information and communi-
cation technologies) products and applications are frequently
designed in ignorance of developing countries’ realities and
fail to address the needs of the most disadvantaged sections
Table 3. Breakdown of contributions to mainstream scien-
tific publications, by regions or large countries [Cetto, 2001].
(GDP - gross domestic product)
Region or % public. publ./GDP publ./popul.
country
Europe 37.5 165 424
CIS 3.7 125 76
Subsaharan
Africa 0.7 29 –
North
America 36.6 163 717
Latin
America 1.8 21 22
Industrialized
Asia 10.8 69 113
China 2.0 16 –
India 1.9 47 11
World 100.0 100.0 100.0
of the community [UN, 1998]. As pointed out by Arunacha-
lam [2000], the gulf in the levels of science and technology
between the developed and the developing countries will tend
to widen further with the rapid expansion of the internet in
the West and the speedy transition to electronic publishing,
and this can lead to increased brain drain and dependence
on foreign aid of a different kind (knowledge imperialism).
However, as was stated already in the 1996 Conference
[EPS, 1996], in some developing countries electronic pub-
lishing is not only seen as an opportunity but as a challenge,
despite persistent problems of infrastructure, connectivity,
resources, etc. Indeed, it has been recognized by scholars in
these countries as an interesting and powerful tool to over-
come some of the weaknesses of local journal publishing. A
few examples are here described as an illustration.
In Brazil, out of a total of 3,630 scholarly journals hav-
ing an ISSN register, 194 have been selected by their quality
for governmental support and 80 of these existed in elec-
tronic format already in 1998; interestingly, 33 of these were
electronic only [Goncalves da Silva, 1998]. When consulted
about their plans to develop the electronic version of their
journal, a majority of the other editors responded affirma-
tively (without thereby cancelling the paper version) but
others gave priority to the updating of the printed version.
In fact, Brazil has been a pioneer in Latin America with the
development of BIREME, an information system for medi-
cal journals. Now it is developing ScieELO-Scientific Elec-
tronic Library Online, an electronic virtual library providing
full-text access to a selection of Brazilian scholarly journals
through indexes and search facilities. The pioneer applica-
tion is the SciELO Brazil site (http://www.scielo.br/), Chile
(http://www.scielo.cl/) is implementing the second applica-
tion, and further recent advances are reported in a compan-
ion article [Packer, 2001].
In Mexico, out of a total of 752 scholarly journals, 72
electronic titles have been identified, which seems a compar-
atively high percentage; however, not all of them provide full
text online [Reyna, 2000]. Most of these are in the biomed-

10. cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science 29
ical sciences (37%), in contrast to the Brazilian case where
the percentage in the social sciences is higher (over 40%).
When studied more carefully, these journals show a series of
editorial deficiencies that could readily be solved with the
development of an appropriate methodology. In addition,
the National University (UNAM) recently launched an on-
line full-text digital journal library with an initial number of
5 titles, which it is rapidly increasing.
Further relevant examples of a similar kind are In-
fomed, the well-established telematic health network of
Cuba (http://www.infomed.sld.cu/), with over six years of
experience, and Imbiomed, the Mexican index of biomedical
journals (http://www.imbiomed.com.mx/). This list is not
exhaustive, and one can observe on a day-to-day basis that
new journal titles and digital libraries continue to appear on
the web, throughout the Continent. In fact, with the help
of Latindex (http://www.latindex.unam.mx/), an online re-
gional information system for scholarly journals published in
Iberoamerica and the Caribbean, it is possible to trace new
titles as they appear on the internet. The Latindex Direc-
tory has compiled basic data on 10,000 serial titles (mostly
paper-only) from 30 countries, and the second product, an
online Catalogue covering a carefully built selection of jour-
nals, is under construction.
The most prominent initiatives for African journals are
not yet based in Africa. African Journals Online, man-
aged by INASP (www.inasp.org.uk/), aims to promote the
awareness and use of African-published journals in the sci-
ences by providing access to tables of contents on the In-
ternet, backed by a document delivery service. It features
fifty African-published scholarly journals (excluding South
Africa). INASP investigates now the possibility of the pro-
gramme being maintained in and from Africa. ¡b¿Electronic
Publishing Trust for Development¡/b¿ is a parallel initia-
tive, that offers tables of contents, abstracts and full text
in electronic format of nine African-published journals (is-
sues from 1995-7 onwards) as part of the Bioline Service
(http://www.bdt.org.br/bioline/).
A further interesting initiative in Africa is the Digital-IST
(Information in Science and Technology) project, aimed at
introducing the personal computer, multimedia and internet
in the Algerian publishing system [Bakelli, 1999].
Participatory initiatives of this sort, aimed at increasing
the publishing capacity and hence the diffusion and visibility
of research produced in developing countries, were discussed
in the Conference session devoted to the topic [EPS, 2001],
where it was considered important to foster national and
regional partnership and alliances, as well as international
support for these initiatives.
6. Science Communication With the
Broader Public
As far back as 1922, W. Ogburn [1922], in his theory of cul-
tural lag, observed that changes in material culture, i.e. “the
applications of scientific discovery and the material products
of technology”, occur at a faster rate than do changes in the
non-material, adaptive culture (e.g. norms, values, patterns
of social organization), thereby causing mal – adjustment in
this non-material culture. Many of the recent major changes
are technologically driven; we are living in systems that have
been significantly changed by the applications of science and
technology. Yet our values and norms are still attuned to
an earlier era, and our non- material culture has remained
in general distant from science and technology. One con-
sequence is our inability to properly face the many ethical
issues arising from recent advances in science and technology.
It is therefore time to revise the relation between sci-
ence, technology and society, so that we are in a condition
to face the conflicts arising from this maladjustment and
evolve smoothly in a world that is being so rapidly modified
by technological circumstances. All important in this nec-
essary revision is an appreciation of diversity as one of the
factors by which our evolution takes place.
Local social context is always crucial for the successful
implementation and use of new technologies. For the much
needed communication between science and the public, it is
important that the appropriate social networks, languages
and symbols are in place, and that the modern technologies
are used to facilitate a rapprochement between the actors
of the scientific and technological changes, and other groups
that have been mostly passive observers.
As scientists we have a special duty: it is our turn to take
steps for this rapprochement. We have an extraordinary new
tool to communicate science, and there is a huge public out-
side, that is growing in numbers and is also becoming more
internet-literate; a public that has seen technology being in-
corporated into its material culture but no science being in-
corporated into its non-material counterpart. Putting aside
some remarkable exceptions, the scientific community has
not taken it to itself to communicate with the thousands
or millions of people who day by day log into the net and
navigate in search for information, or something to learn, or
understand, or discover,... or simply to find amusement.
The medical (health) community has gone much farther in
this task (with over 10,000 dedicated sites in the USA alone,
offering an impressive range of services), and the biomedical
community (including bioinformatics) is catching up. But
most scientists still maintain as their high - almost unique
– priority to communicate with their peers alone. A few
scientific societies and associations for the advancement of
science are notable exceptions. However, considering that
the success of communication in science is strongly context-
dependent, a much greater effort is required to communicate
and to establish intelligent dialogues with the various sectors
of society that demand or are in need of clear, reliable, trans-
parent scientific information for a whole range of reasons.
To illustrate the point, a brief survey was made of the
web pages dedicated to science in Spanish, using these two
as key words [Cetto, 2000]. A total of 345,000 pages were
found using the Altavista search engine – in contrast to 15
million pages on science in English – most of them hosted in
Spain, a few Latin American countries, and the USA. Out
of the first 100 items in the list, only 29 were selected as
meaningful, as the remaining ones did not offer any scientific
content.

11. 30 cetto: contribution of electronic communication to science
These 29 had the following features:
• There are a number of commercial portals with just
one page on science
• The web pages containing some scientific material are
difficult to classify, by their variety of services, con-
tents and scope
• A number of them lack rigorous content or even pro-
vide incorrect information
• Many provide information on health only, although
they appear as “science and health” pages
• The best pages are produced by scholarly societies or
institutions, although there are also a few personal
initiatives of good quality
• Services offered include: notes, news, games and ex-
periments, answers to questions, access to journals,
book reviews, biographies, directories of institutions,
and relevant links
• Commercial sites tend to reproduce existing material,
while scholarly ones include a certain amount of orig-
inal material.
It is evident that whatever is published — and what is
not published — on the web today, be it specialized re-
search journals or other kinds of material for communica-
tion or popularization purposes, is not in general the result
of any scientific information policy or of carefully examined
and agreed strategies. Only recently have there been some
official expressions of concern in this regard, notably from
the Commission of the European Communities, according to
which “the development of new and sustained forms of dia-
logue between researchers and other social operators should
be encouraged” [CEC, 2000]. The new technologies open
up a very valuable opportunity to establish different modes
of communication not just with our partners but also with
other stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. They invite
us to revise the approach, the concepts and practices of ’sci-
ence popularization’, ’public understanding of science’, etc.
and to redesign them so as to establish the much needed
real links — as opposed to virtual — between science and
society.
Concluding Remarks
Let us not forget that the technological innovations of
the fifteenth century related to the Gutenberg press, that
were essential for the development of scholarly journals, took
place long before the first journals appeared. Many features
of print communication that are now standard (such as al-
phabetical ordering, page numbering, peer reviewing and
citing of previously published papers) were only gradually
introduced along the centuries [Schaffner, 1995]. Initially,
one can expect the electronic journal to replace the paper
journal to the extent that it fulfills at least the basic func-
tions of the latter, though in the longer run, when electronic
journals have become the natural thing, the new technologies
will possibly add new functions, eliminate some of the for-
mer ones, or carry them out in intrinsically different ways;
eventually, then, the print journal might be displaced by
the new “thing” which we now call electronic journal and
which probably will be something different from what we
now have in mind. In the present transient stage, we have
to be patient and cope with a multiplicity of formats, inter-
faces, ill-defined objects that change or disappear, without
really knowing where we are heading – but attempting at
the same time to actively influence the outcome.
Certainly the new technologies will continue having an
impact on the way scientists communicate amongst them-
selves and with other people. But, as has also been evident
along the discussion in the present text, external conditions
that determine the evolution of science, its structure, its in-
stitutional arrangements and its relation with society, are
influencing the pace and the modalities of the transition to
the electronic format. Amongst these conditions perhaps
the most salient one is the present scenario of disparities
and differences within and between countries, which should
be seriously considered in any strategic discussion on the fu-
ture of electronic publishing and communication in science.
Acknowledgment. The author wishes to thank the staff of the
General Library Directorate as well as of the Institute of Physics
library, both at UNAM, for helpful information and extensive
document delivery. Thanks are given also to the organizers of
the Conference for their support and to Graciela Muñoz for her
patient revision of the manuscript.
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(Received 27 February 2001)
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