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Subscription costs, along with the rest of the world's inflationary 
spiral, are a material problem of substantial concern to users of scientific 
journals. 'As journal prices escalate, comments an institutional official, 
libraries are forced to cancel more and more subscriptions, thus providing 
poorer collections for the scholar. Although the library market accounts 
for only a small income, without this reliable base income publishers 
cannot exist... [Increasing priges without an equivalent increase in quantity 
or quality is not the answer.' 
The introduction, this autumn, by Comtex of the first in a projected 
family of 22 electronic journals, should have a marked effect on the 
status and future of some printed journals. The president of this firm, a 
former university teacher named Frederick Plotkin, plans to reach the 70 
per cent of North America's 1.9 million scientific workers who have access 
to a mini- or a micro-computer. Plotkin's methods are anything but 
traditional, according to Science. 'Submission to the Comtex journals will 
be refereed and on-line in... 6 to 8 weeks, the process being further 
sweetened by a $100 honorarium /paid/ to the author. Stored in a central 
computer, reports can then, be picked up via /telephone/ lines by scientists 
all over North America... This may or may not presage the wave of the 
future of scientific journals, in North America and elsewhere, but the 
enterprising publisher is reported to have garnered $17 million in advance 
orders. Certainly one can anticipate competition to come between pub- 
lishers of conventional printed paper and tomorrow's purveyors of elecroni- 
cally transmitted data. 
In conclusion, we should add a word about the proliferation during 
the past ten or fifteen years of highly specialized journals having 
small circulation figures (several hundred to about 2,500 copies per printing). 
These have been affordable by their publishers because of (a) the frequent 
sharing of editorial and publishing resources with other journals emitted 
by the same house, (b) the commonplace resort to asking authors to pay 
'page charges,’ (c) careful advance market studies and coherent distri- 
bution schemes, (d) highly rationalized production methods, and (e) the 
ability to respond relatively readily to the vanity of authors. 
With inflationary rise, fluctuation in currency values and the pro- 
bable competition stemming from electronic publishing, it can be surmised 
that the multiplicity of today's journal titles will diminish over the 
coming years. The titles are likely to be regrouped into themes represent- 
ing a broader spectrum of a given discipline or major sub-discipline, while 
some may disappear altogether. In the instance of journals of popular 
science, these can be expected to hold the attention of at least the large 
audiences they currently command, in many countries. 
Sina J. Root of the American Museum of Natural History, in a letter to 
Science,Vol.216, 4 June 1982. 
“william J. Broad, Journals: Fearing the Electronic Future, Science, Vol.216, 
28th May 1982. 
Jacques Richardson is Head of the Science and 
Society Section of UNESCO. He has helped prepare 
the science-technology-society portions of UNESCO's 
Draft Medium-Term Plan for the period 1984-89. He 
was formerly associate publisher of the French 
scientific monthly La Recherche, and is editor of 
UNESCO's quarterly journal, impact of science on 
society, since 1972. Editor or co-editor of five 
books, he has recently co-produced with BBC TV and 
The Open University a half hour videotape 'What 
is Science ?' 
  
Richardson 10