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With well over 15 million readers, a catchment area reaching from Paris to
Peking and a readership profile that would turn most high-brow publications
green with envy, the Internet – the world’s largest open access computer
network – looks like the perfect publishing medium for many of today’s
academic and scientific journals. Indeed many medics, scientists and
engineers already use the network to exchange ideas and discuss recent
research, so transferring finished papers in this way seems like the next
logical step.

But before the major publishers and their authors throw themselves into this
new era of international publishing, they want to be confident that their
rights, recognition – and profits – are safe. Many believe the key to this
protection is to find ways to force readers of this electronic material to
abide by the copyright law. The idea behind this law, which applies both to
paper and electronic media, is to give authors some control over the use of
their work, although with magazines and journals published in Britain, the
US, Canada and Australia this right is usually transferred from the author
to the publisher.

In today’s paper-driven publishing environment enforcing copyright is more
‘by luck than judgment’ and policing the system is difficult with
photocopiers everywhere says Edward Barrow, the business licence officer, at
Britain’s Copyright Licensing Agency – a non-profit-making organisation
owned by authors and publishers. Despite these difficulties the CLA, which
was founded in 1982 following a government report on copyright and new
technology, tries to deal with the problem of multiple copying by charging
schools, universities and companies a licence fee. At present the CLA does
not have the authority to licence copying between computers, but Barrow
believes that the organisation will find a way to ‘ensure creative people,
and those who invest in their work receive some reward’, in the new
electronic publishing world.

Practical approaches to providing this protection are now being
investigated. The European Commission, for example, is funding a project
called Copyright in Transmitted Electronic Documents (CITED) under its
ESPRIT research programme. And in the US the rights of copyright owners
whose material is carried over computer networks are being taken into
account in the proposed High Performance Computing and High Speed Networking
Applications Act, which was approved by the House of Representatives Science
Subcommittee in June. Also in the US some major scientific publishers, such
as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and
Elsevier Science Publishers, are running pilot network publishing
programmes, which they hope will provide an insight into the best approach
to running electronic publications.

CATCHING THE COPIERS

One of the key issues that concerns traditional scientific publishers about
this new electronic era is that computers make the copying of information
very easy. Once a document is available on a computer it can be copied,
printed out, or pasted into another document – in seconds. If the computer
is connected to a network, the situation is even more worrying for
publishers because the electronic document can be copied to multiple sites
across the network, providing perfect copies to anything from a few people
in one company to the thousands who plug into the Internet – itself a cause
for concern to some because it is essentially self governing. In fact the
academic and commercial network suppliers are proud that they keep this
global communication system running by working together. This strong
community feeling also means that any plans to impose central control over
the network would be strongly opposed, and probably impractical to
implement. But Barrow believes that even in the relatively anarchic
environment of computer networks there is room for a technical solution that
will give owners of copyright some protection. His organisation is looking
at the work by the CITED researchers, who are developing a model for
charging and controlling the use of material under copyright.

So far the ESPRIT team has produced software modules that allow
administrators to assign specific viewing rights to different users: for
example, one user might get a single look at an abstract, while another can
view and print out the whole document on 10 separate occasions. The rights
can either be linked to a password, or held on a credit-card style ‘swipe
card’. The CITED model also automatically links copyright material with the
licence that applies to that particular reference, and maintains an audit
trail so that all accesses to the system are noted.

A prototype of this system has been used to protect documents distributed on
CD-ROM for use on a computer which is not connected to a network. But, as
Barrow points out, monitoring how a person uses a file in a network where
there is two-way communication between each of the attached computers is
much more difficult than keeping tabs on the number of times a user opens a
document on a standalone system. The CITED team is confident, however, that
the model can be adapted to cover network distribution of journals.

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

In the US interest in finding a solution to the copyright problem is also
growing. Under the networking act, groups developing electronic libraries
would have to include practical ideas for protecting copyright material in
their plans. The act is also calling for electronic systems which can
identify copyright works and indicating whether any permission has been
granted by the copyright owner.

So far most of the work on copyrighting electronic material in the US has
been done by the publishers, some of whom have jumped in at the deep end and
started producing and distributing electronic journals. One of the first to
take the plunge was the AAAS with Current Clinical Trials, which is
currently celebrating its first birthday. Patricia Morgan, associate
publisher and director of publications for the AAAS, thinks that electronic
journals distributed over the network are the way forward for scientific
publishing. ‘I know people have been talking about electronic journals since
the 1970s, and they have been slow to arrive, but I believe that so many
people now have PCs and Internet links, that we will not go back to an era
when scholars will settle for not communicating electronically,’ she says.

To achieve career success academics need to publish papers on a regular
basis in learned journals. This is often a time-consuming process that can
take several months from a reaercher’s results being verified by other
experts in the field (peer review), to the point at which the results are
published. In today’s ‘fast food’ society this is not good enough, academics
are already used to having almost instant responses to their comments
through the informal ‘chatter’ that occurs across the Internet, in addition
in areas such as clinical medicine patients are demanding that results on
new drugs and procedures are published faster following their approval by
the US Food and Drug Administration. Current Clinical Trials was set up to
address these demands. In contrast to the equivalent paper journals, which
could take up to four months to publish results, Current Clinical Trials
promises to publish papers within 48 hours of them clearing peer review – a
process that itself is increasingly carried out over the Internet.

It is possible to achieve this fast turnaround because papers do not need to
be printed or physically distributed. A paper that has been accepted is
edited and converted into a computer file which is put into code, and sent
to readers over the Internet. As with traditional paper journals, the
readers pay an annual subscription (currently $120), but instead of
getting a journal they get a password and software for decoding and viewing
the papers. So far the AAAS has not used any technology which would enforce
copyright. The users’ rights are displayed when they view the document,
rather like the copyright notice inside the cover of a traditional journal,
and adherence depends on the goodwill and honesty of also readers. The AAAS
also supplies traditional paper reprints which can be bought separately.
Morgan says this is important because the electronic paper is not yet widely
accepted in academic circles. Convincing authors their work will gain the
same respect as in a paper journal has proved a bigger issue for Current
Clinical Trials than copyright.

But Morgan admits that the potential for redistributing papers over college
networks is worrying, and over the next year she intends to find an
effective way of licensing sites. This is also an area that another major
academic publisher, Elsevier Science Publishers, will be looking at with The
University Licensing Program. ‘We are assuming that in the near future all
our journals will need to be distributed both in paper and electronic form,
and in the longer term paper publication may go away for some of our
journals,’ says Karen Hunter, vice-president of Elsevier. TULIP, which went
live in January, is initially looking at the electronic distribution of 42
journals including The Journal of Nuclear Materials, and Surface Science.
These journals, which are still being published in their traditional paper
format, will be sent over the Internet to nine universities.

These universities will be encouraged to come up with ideas about how they
want to use the journals, where the electronic journals should be held, and
how to avoid unlicensed copying of the material. According to Hunter, no two
sites are taking the same approach so far. ‘We are certainly testing a lot
of models,’ says Hunter, who adds that enthusiasm for the project is very
high, although electronic distribution is turning out to be harder work than
expected.

Publishers like the AAAS and Elsevier think the extra effort will pay off
and that computer networks will become an increasingly important publishing
medium. And the papers they carry won’t necessarily need to be just text and
graphics. In the US there are already plans for a high-bandwidth National
Research and Education Network, while in Britain a pilot of the Joint
Academic Network – Super JANET – is being tested. These high-speed networks
which can carry very large amounts of data will allow users to send video,
animated graphics and audio, in the same way they send text and graphics
today.

But before this potential can be tapped the authors and publishers have to
take the plunge into the electronic era. ‘I think a lot of publishers have
tried to avoid the electronic revolution because of fears over copyright
infringement,’ says Morgan. But she adds that in the long run individuals,
institutions and publishers should have the same interests at heart – to
contribute to the scholarly process – and this will never be achieved if
people continue putting up barriers.

Chris Long is a freelance writer.