The prediction, in brief:

The vast majority of print journals will disappear or be transformed into electronic journals in the next 10 to 20 years.

Predictor: Odlyzko, Andrew

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 Andrew Odlyzko, an AT&T Bell Laboratories mathematician, and Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Leslie writes:”It is likely that electronic publication represents the future of academic journals. Odlyzko, author of a paper called ‘Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals,’ predicts that the vast majority of print journals will disappear or be transformed into electronic journals in the next 10 to 20 years. Some electronic journals have already experimented with developing parallel bulletin board discussion groups, and some electronic journal editors foresee the creation of linked MUD-like ‘virtual corridors’ in which colleagues trade ideas. [Paul] Ginsparg envisions an alternative to ‘all-or-nothing’ peer review; instead, he says, journals could embody the evolving nature of research by dividing articles into several categories, or, better yet, by placing them within a ‘fluid medium’ in which discussion and affixing of addenda and errata are encouraged. All these notions, of course, embody the activities that cyberspace seems inherently to promote: the materiality of printed journals and the impermeable individuality of their authors gives way to the interaction, collaboration, and community that the electronic medium fosters. If the change is only in its beginning stages now, one reason is that most of the current members of university tenure committees belong to the last generation of scholars not steeped in the computer culture, and have so far declined to acknowledge publication in electronic journals as a ‘credential for promotion.’ Poised to make the leap but uncertain of its benefits, they may not understand the trade-off. What they’re being asked to give up, after all, is the illusion of permanence.”

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: Paraphrase

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: Lusk, James T.