nt. How will they respond to publications like the EJS which can be offered for free and can turn around submissions in less than two months? I suspect that if we look, we will find just another example of flexible production and the "lean and mean" ethos of competitive capitalism. Indeed, with journals like the EJS setting the example, we could just find a set of responses considerably more ugly than we might initially expect. There are other issues we need to examine as well. One particularly interesting one is the way traditional publishers are going to adapt their financial operations to the new media. If as Ginsparg suggests, the new unit of publication should be the paper and not the journal, might not journals choose to offer their submissions on a pay-per-view basis? And might not this lead scholars and librarians to the slaughter? As noted earlier, some have argued that we no longer need the traditional publishers to collect and distribute material. However the same argument could easily be made about libraries. With the super-search tools now available, and the low cost of storage, might not a publishers simply archive all the journals and all the volumes they have ever published on a collection of 20 gigabyte disks and offer them for sale directly to interested parties at say, 20 dollars a pop? Scholars would lose since universities would have a sound justification for reducing their budgets for journals (would tenured professors get a pay raise to compensate - not likely) and libraries and librarians would lose for reasons that do not need to be enumerated.(55)As we begin to conduct research on the publishing industry, we'll need to keep a couple of things in mind. In the first place, the actual outcome of the battles that lie ahead will likely be sensitive to the particular discipline in which the lines are drawn. In high-energy physics for example, the future of traditional publishers looks pretty grim. Paul Ginsparg's dat...
