Speaker: Annette Holtkamp (DESY)

Panel Discussion: Current Thinking Panel

Pat has already covered DESY's contribution to the SPIRES data base so I won't talk about that. I'm sorry to say that DESY, at the moment, represents the conservative faction in this E-print business. About half of our papers get submitted to the electronic archives, but that's based on individual decisions of the authors, not on official DESY policy, and you will find no experimental DESY papers yet on hep-ex. The main reason is probably a kind of generation gap, because people that are really very skilled in using new electronic tools are not those that determine our policy and there are so many people around that prefer photocopying to getting a printout via www for instance. On the other hand, I think it's quite legitimate to stick to the means of literature research you're used to and for the time being, I'd favor a dual system. That's why we still make a paper copy for display of every relevant E-print. Our library is a meeting place and I would like to see this social function preserved in some way or other. So that was the conservative part.

Now about the future of journals. One main restriction will certainly be monetary. Whereas Daisy is still quite well off, the situation of the German universities is certainly much more drastic and I know of at least one physics institute that can't even afford Physics Letters. The higher the percentage of E-prints the stronger the administrative pressure will be to cancel subscriptions, so the importance of preprints as the main information source in high energy physics will still increase. My impression is that journal articles are going to suffer a similar fate to revised E-prints. Very few people will care to look at them. This impression is confirmed by some numbers which perhaps will be shown later. They demonstrate that there is a drastic difference in the number of citations a preprinted journal article gets in comparison to a non preprinted one. So if printed journals have a future, they should certainly be drastically reduced in size and this should certainly be accompanied by an equally drastic reduction in subscription prices. Perhaps we can learn from the astronomers or the mathematicians how to get back to a functioning refereeing system in order to reduce journal size. One should really look at other physics fields because I think high energy physics is quite unique in this preprint business and perhaps one should think about abolishing preprints and going back to journals. I don't quite understand what the reason for this special role of high energy physics, but perhaps someone else can talk about that.

One personal remark: as you know we are doing input for SPIRES and as we are wadng through this flood of publications, I am getting terribly frustrated by the redundancy of all these papers. When I discover that three talks by the same author present results that have already been covered by another preprint, I'm feeling quite fed up. So one suggestion: One could follow the example of the Glasgow conference to establish a home page for every conference, store papers there for a limited amount of time and keep them out of the electronic archives unless they present new results that have not been published before.