How Scientists Get Publications: An Empirical Study of How the Internet Replaces Paper Media (I)

Although some scientific publications are currently published in avant-garde fashion, such as providing free electronic magazines and electronic subscription documents, the Internet has little influence on the publishing behavior of current mainstream scientific publications. Those traditional paper magazines come with an electronic version, but this is provided to subscribers and is not yet a complete solution. There is now an increasingly clear trend that some researchers, especially young researchers, are reluctant to obtain publications (whether paper or electronic) by subscribing and rely almost entirely on them. Research work is done on the Internet for free information, which is often an informal publication posted on the author's home page.

In February 2000, we conducted a survey on how scientists obtained publications that measure how much the Internet has changed the exchange of scientific information and the attitude of researchers. This article provides the results of this survey. The survey analyzed 236 recycled online questionnaires and determined that about 3,000 researchers in the field of building information technology and construction management are currently online.

The questions on the questionnaire are related to the following aspects: how researchers find, contact and read the information of different channels; what publications they usually read, how many; what seminars they participate in, usually the number of participants in one year Meetings like that; what are the criteria for what they publish and what articles they publish. Some of these issues involve traditional publishing and electronic publishing, and the last part deals specifically with the opinions of these researchers on electronic publishing.

According to the survey, researchers downloaded half of the digital materials they saw on the Internet. The practice of researchers obtaining publications of interest is to download them directly from authors or publishers. This practice is currently most common. Researchers are less willing to pay for scientific publications in electronic form. There are many e-magazines available online for free, making this method of researcher feasible. Of course, the fees will be paid by professional associations or publishing organizations.

Foreword The efficiency of the scientific publishing process is a very important issue for society as a whole. In most industrialized countries, spending on research and development (R&D: research and development) accounts for at least 3% of GDP in these countries, and the indirect impact of R&D on all aspects of society is evident. However, from the perspective of information dissemination in this field, there are relatively few activities in R&D. The science publishing mechanism has taken shape in the last two centuries, and the impact of the Internet revolution on this field seems to be minimal. Academic groups seem to have great difficulty in changing their attitudes and operating the publishing system.

Scientists generally spend 50-60% of their time communicating information, and any innovation that facilitates the exchange of information with their peers and other aspects of the industry has a long-term significance. A prominent example of how free R&D information contributes to the progress of this field is the role of the Internet itself. All Internet standards and the vast majority of research papers are freely available on the Internet and not sold through a standard organization or need to pay for expensive funds to subscribe to paper magazines.

An important aspect of the scientific communication process also includes sketches, conference papers, and peer-research discussions. In general, academics read more than 100 such publications each year. This means that each year they spend weeks querying and getting relevant information. At the same time, it is also possible to miss the opportunity by ignoring some important publications. This may be due to the lack of sensitivity to these publications, or because these publications are too boring, or because they have to be costly to obtain.

“As readers, scientists are very positive about free e-magazines and strongly support the development of free e-magazines; however, as authors, they are very conservative when they choose to publish their works.”

The only dissemination mechanism for these papers was published in the form of paper publications. This situation continued until several years ago. Since the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet has largely changed this situation. Here are some channels for obtaining information in this area:

· Traditional paper magazines and meeting records;
· E-magazines and electronic meeting minutes, but only through subscriptions or pay-per-view payments;
· Only electronic magazines are issued and can be obtained free of charge;
· Occasionally access to various forms of materials on the author's home page or their institution;
· A small number of digitally-ordered versions of documents.

Among these information acquisition channels, traditional paper media magazines and meeting records still occupy a major position, but the method of downloading the fourth so-called “fortuitous material” is already very popular. The biggest drawback of this method is that these materials are usually not found in the index effectively, but are obtained in other citations, which is equivalent to paying for the so-called "official documents". The market share of free e-magazines is still very small (there were only 400 such magazines in 1999), but the total number of academic magazines is estimated to have reached 100,000. At present, only a very small number of successful free e-books have been issued.

Prior to the emergence of communication channels for personal computer word processing programs and the Internet, commercial science publishers needed to provide many value-added services, so they had been in control of all publications of these publications. Scientists provide content, editing, commentary, and quality control for free. Publishers enter these papers and print and distribute these papers. The publication of such papers today is no longer a problem: Scientists can publish their own papers because the Internet provides a marketing and distribution channel that does not require additional costs.

As a free e-zine publisher like Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, we have been inspecting scientific publishing for five years and have experienced little progress in this mode shift. Joy and many of our colleagues are reluctant to change the disappointment of traditional publishing habits. In fact, the reader’s and author’s attitudes are quite obvious: readers want free internet magazines, but authors generally want their work to be published in high-volume media magazines, which encourages us to adopt more. An empirical approach to examine how our peers identify and obtain the publications they want to read