Editorial: What is on the Research Agenda?

Change drives most publishing activity, since new technologies, regulations, industries, vocations, political developments and lifestyles provide publishers with markets and audiences. More important, perhaps, is the potential for publishing to effect changes in readers' behavior by informing, persuading, or entertaining. In the last issue of PRQ, outgoing editor Beth Luey assembled nine stimulating essays making recommendations for a publishing research agenda that would help identify and describe changes in society, technology, reader research, libraries, bookselling, law, historiography, and demographic methodologies.

The present issue of PRQ offers articles on several topics. The memoir of Earl Coleman, founder of consultant's Bureau/Plenum Press, recalls his innovation of the translation journal forty years ago, a radical venture at the time in more ways than one, illuminating a concept that has been highly successful and widely copied. National Science Foundation is the focus of two articles: Prof. Herbert S. White provides a historical review of NSF's departure from library research. An internal policy memorandum provides some insight into the NSF decision process and a historical footnote to the history of science publishing. Teresa Mlawer provides a personal perspective on opportunities exploited and missed, based on her experience selling Spanish-language publications to what might be called America's second largest market. Dr. Peter Marzuk and his team show how the effectiveness of a particular book--its power to change readers' behavior--can be assessed through a remarkable analysis of public information. There are many data sources that offer the possibility of analyses of importance. One of these is the CAS database of chemical literature, which shows not only the growth of chemical articles and patents, but the transition from a German-language convention to one that is largely in English (even though an NSF database tells us that the U.S. authors account for less than 23% of articles in chemistry). An essay on Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order, an anarchist newspaper edited by Benjamin R. Tucker, identifies the significance of a major American periodical published between 1881 and 1908. Rounding out the issue are a number of reviews of important and notable publications.

There is one major topic that, in our humble opinion, cries for urgent atten- tion: how the productivity of technical research and development is related to changes in the dissemination of research results. Little new data has been published on this topic since 1981, when Donald W. King's landmark sum- mary, Scientific Journals in the United States: Their Production, Use and Economics was issued. King identified libraries--institutions contemplated nowhere in

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recent science policy documents--as a vital source of scientists' readings. Since that time, little effort has been made to learn what information resources re- searchers use and how they are used. We consider the topic to be of major importance because of the amount of money invested in research. In the United States, which accounts for less than 40 percent of all research published, but has potential access to all publications through its libraries, annual R&D in- vestments exceeded $160 billion nationally, including $19 billion at colleges and universities. A substantial additional sum is spent on research in the Arts, probably bringing the total investment to well over $200 billion. What do we have to show for it? The main work product of research is publications: re- search reports, monographs, reviews, letters, conference papers, and reference works. Where do we find them? In the library. What do we know about their use and the return on our investment in research? Very little indeed.

Thus this issue of PRQ starts with the first of a series of articles reviewing the mosaic of data, theories, policies, and controversies relating to the state of scholarly communications and libraries---a topic that, outside of the largely ephemeral literature of librarianship, has lain fallow for more than two de- cades. Our intention is twofold: to insert this topic high on the research agenda; and, to inform--perhaps to guide--researchers and policy makers about the status of their investments in research.

You, the reader, are invited to contribute your ideas to discussions that iden- tify needs for new studies and analyses. The aim of such an agenda should be to encourage research that will improve publishers' effectiveness. In part this can be done by enriching the training and education of publishers, authors, editors, and the many communities that interact with publishers. We invite many disciplines--0n no particular order) sociology, economics, psychology, business, journalism, art, communications, engineering, political science, an- thropology, history, education, law, geography, information science, aesthet- ics, language and literature, and the publishing industry-- to apply their meth- odologies to publishing research.

-Albert Henderson Editor