Editorial Processing Centres: A View from the United Kingdom

Abstract

Faced with mounting economic pressures and changing market conditions, publishers of scholarly works, especially scientific societies, must look for different products, cheaper production methods, new technologies and different systems of information dissemination. In the short term, a move away from conventional printing to microforms, synopsis journals, etc. will provide greater flexibility while adoption of data-processing techniques during the editorial stages can help reduce costs of conventional printed products. In the main, individual learned societies are too small to take advantage of available new technologies because of the investments and the high volumes of throughput that are required.

The concept of Editorial Processing Centres (EPCs) was developed in the USA under the auspices of the NSF. It postulates a cooperative venture between societies to provide computer text handling capabilities, communications control and photo-typesetting facility. In a series of studies, Aspen Systems Corp. and Westat Inc. developed 4 progressive configurations of EPCs and an economic model which showed cost savings of up to 15% over conventional methods (depending on the configuration adopted and number of journals processed).

Aslib R&D Department has recently completed a project funded by the British Library R&D Department to review and evaluate the potential EPCs in the UK. Despite the difficulties of generalising costs and practices of learned society publishinga simple comparative exercise showed there are potential savings to be gained from the technical innovations suggested, even when one of the requirements of the American studies (for authors to submit manuscripts in OCR-type) is eliminated because of impracticality in the UK. The cost savings in smaller EPCs arise almost exclusively at the typesetting stage whereas editorial costs are slightly increased.

Rapidly developing technology and continuing falls in the real cost of computing make the prospects of using these technologies much more viable for smaller processing units than even a short time ago. Problems are more likely to occur in the social and organizational areas than in technical and economic ones. Developments will have to be coordinated with changes in social expectations and availability of suitable equipment elsewhere in the community. A particular problem relates to the position of honorary subject editors and referees; current systems to handle their requirements are clumsy and costly. Future systems might rely on widespread availability of dial-up facilities or on professionalization. In either case substantial modifications will be required in work patterns and may involve erosion of the inbuilt values of present systems, possibly counterbalanced by quality improvements elsewhere.

The studies were funded by the British Library R & D Department.