Introduction and Background
Much has been said and written about the future of scholarly publishing, by this author (1a-e) and many others (2), particularly as it relates to electronic publishing. From a handful of electronic editions of print journals in the early 1990's, there are now a few thousand electronic versions or electronic editions of print journals (3). Virtually every publisher of chemistry journals has both a Internet web site and some sort of electronic version ("pdf" and/or "html") of most, if not all, of their peer reviewed journals. To many scholars and librarians, these electronic versions of their print journals indicate the usual conservative approach publishers take to new situations. At present virtually all publishers tend to think and act as if the technology of the internet and world wide web is primarily for duplicating print publication in an alternative form, rather than viewing this technology as a way for opening up new means for scientific results and information to be created, disseminated and delivered. Partly as a result of this aggressive timidness of the mainstream publishers there are just a few dozen purely peer reviewed electronic journals, that is, journals for which there is no print equivalent. Many of these efforts in the electronic publishing area are causing numerous and diverse problems to all four main stake-holders involved in this endeavor - the authors, the publishers, the libraries, and the readers.
Some authors see purely electronic publishing (with no print equivalent) as a way to distribute their scholarly efforts more quickly and easily and cheaply. Some authors, however, see purely electronic journals, as well as electronic editions of print journals, as an easy way for people to plagiarize their work, as people search the Internet and find data and results, which they republish as their own (as if this has never happened in print). Still other authors find both these types of electronic publishing as a way to quickly find and link related works and studies. Some authors worry that their scholarly contributions will disappear into a black hole and be lost forever if a computer system malfunctions or that they will not be counted as relevant at the time they present their credentials for promotion and tenure. Some authors worry, with some current justification, that no one will read or be able to get a copy of their manuscripts because of bizarre policies on the part of some publishers (4). Some authors worry that without peer review the scholarly literature will be strewn with trash. The physics preprint server, developed by Ginsparg (5), is an excellent example of how the current technology can greatly improve communication of information within the physics community and shows how these fears are unfounded.
Some publishers see electronic editions of their print journals as a way to increase prices by offering a much more valuable product - quicker publishing, linked references, full text searching, easier access to their journals, ability to offer color instead of black and white figures at no additional cost (to the publishers), video, chemical structure search, 3-D structure manipulation, and so on. Many publishers are offering interesting licenses to obtain access to electronic journals so as to restrict interlibrary loan (an electronic oxymoron?). There are even a few in the publishing field who see purely electronic publishing as a very strong threat to their future existence, since scholars can now bypass the publisher by working with their own libraries or other institutional organizations, as discussed at the end of this manuscript. Finally, there are publishers whose reprint income from published papers will be affected by this new method of dissemination. Considering that these manuscripts often come from pharmaceutical, software, and other companies who want reprints of articles they wrote (or of articles they paid for by grants and contracts for the research work) not paying again to have a copy of what was already paid for would be a desirable change for these customers.
As for libraries, some see electronic publishing as another burden on an overly stressed system. Electronic publishing places an enormous burden on a library to become totally digital, while at the same time, potentially placing the librarians' future jobs in jeopardy. Librarians have to serve their current customers who want or need print, while being asked to expand their offerings into electronic areas with few new resources. In fact, some even wonder if the widespread existence of the public library, a 20th century phenomenon in the USA due largely to Andrew Carnegie, may cease.
Last there are the readers, for whom, in principle, the whole system has been created and operates to serve. Often the readers are also authors. In chemistry, as compared to physics, there are many more readers than authors, which is probably part of the reason the physics electronic pre-printer server (5) has had such widespread acceptance in that community although no similar project exists in chemistry. As time goes on and more readers become computer literate and educated the value of good, well designed, and well implemented electronic journals and electronic information products, it is reasonable to expect readers will begin to demand more from these electronic products. Coupled with the smaller role of intermediaries (librarians and information specialists) and the transfer of financial resources to the end user or journal reader, readers will be requesting certain products and services which the publishers and libraries will need to provide or the readers will find alternative solutions, to what the mainstream science publications office offer.
What ties together these four groups of stake-holders or players in the field of scholarly chemistry publishing is their concern over electronic publishing and how to deal with it so as to minimize disruptions in their current way of doing business. "Technological changes always present a problem for the owners of the old technology" (6). Those authors, publishers, and librarians who do not change are the least likely to survive, much less to prosper, in the future. In this subject area all the owners or stake-holders in this system are being confronted with problems. For authors the main issue is simple. Will this new way of presenting the fruits of their labor result in the same recognition as previous ways of publishing? Today there is no way to answer that question, but as a new generation of chemists comes of age and into an era that is more computer and electronic literate, this issue will likely recede.
Privately, publishers see this new technology replacing them (perhaps not completely, but enough to cause serious damage to their current organization, structure, and income) as cars have overwhelmingly replaced horses, PCs have replaced most typewriters, and calculators have replaced all slide rules. While speech did not disappear after Gutenberg started to print bibles, and thinking and memory did not disappear after writing was discovered, there are always those who will fear the absolute worst case scenario and plan and behave accordingly. The current problems in scholarly publishing in general and possible solutions have recently been reported in two articles entitled "To Publish and Perish" (7a) and "Reforming Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective" (7b). The first of these articles discusses the problems of the price explosion of scientific journals in the past two decades and proposes possible steps for the scientific community to regain control of what it produces. The fundamental problem that this first manuscript tries to address is how a number of sociological changes have occurred in a short (but undefined) time frame. It is easy to say that authors should end their preoccupation with numbers (i.e., "I published 40 papers last year, therefore I am good, I deserve a promotion", and so on) so that publication is decoupled from faculty evaluation; that authors should assert property rights (i.e., copyright); and they should invest in electronic publishing. While the authors state that "it is time for the presidents of the nation's major research universities to fish or cut bait", history is not on their side. Will this just be another example of when there is a window of opportunity, university management has the blinds down?
In the second manuscript (7b), the authors voice their concern with the "growing commercialization of scholarship in the sciences, where authors assign their copyrights to commercial publishers". (Actually, authors assign their copyrights to both commercial and non-commercial publishers.) This paper also contains an excellent summary of the increase in the number of published papers and number of scientific journals, and the costs of scientific journals over the past two decades. The authors also discuss some studies and report on who is to blame for the problem of high costs and/or insufficient library budgets. In actuality the blame lies in two places. First, it lies squarely on the authors, who control where things are published, who are the editors and peer-reviewers, and who allow the commercial and non-commercial publishers to determine prices or, in effect, charge whatever they care to. (One solution, to "boycott" publishers who do not meet the needs of readers, seems to be a word that is not in any scholar's vocabulary.) It would be hard to find a business person who would turn down valuable intellectual property provided to him at no cost along with the opportunity to sell it back to the person who just gave it away to him. Why criticize the publisher who really understands the marketplace and the foolishness of its contributors and customers? Few businessmen would refuse an offer of freely given valuable intellectual property along with a giver's promise to buy it back. If publishers' customers are irresponsible, why shouldn't a publisher act the same way? Why are authors and librarians surprised when they are burned after they behave this way? Again one finds that truth is stranger than fiction.
Second, as the reference above (7b) stated, the responsibility lies with heads of universities and other research organizations, who allow their staffs to give away valuable property at no cost to the receiver (the publisher) and then buy it back for a substantial price (7a). Any manager who pays for a product (the published results of research), gives it away, and then pays again to get it back, seems to lack the sort of fiscal and other management skills one would like in most organizations. As these authors (7b) point out, "North America's largest universities, through their research libraries, spent more than $386 million on current serials in 1996, ...". This is a substantial amount of money. These authors sum up their librarians' perspective by mentioning the newly formed Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) whose charter is to not do any actual work or try to create any real products, but rather "whose mission is to be a catalyst" for others. So far its catalytic action has been to generate additional statements, such as those from the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium (7c) who warn that "the very nature of the research enterprise is at risk ...and ...that faculty members and administrators must find better ways of managing intellectual property, both in print and on line, if they hope to protect and promote scholarly communication."
The queues to publish in prestigious journals are still longer than the lines at Disneyland or your local motor vehicles office. Rather than stop submitting papers to highly respected journals, authors should consider withholding complete copyright transfer to the journal publisher and give just a license to publish to the publisher. To establish this practice, there must be leadership and direction from the top. Talk is cheap (well, not so cheap if you are talking to a lawyer or publishing in a scientific journal); it is action that is needed. One group, the members of the study, (8a) "The Transition from Paper", recently proposed such a policy and ways to achieve this change in a plan that has nothing to do with copyright law, but everything to do with copyright (8b).
There needs to be both a carrot and a stick approach to effect change in publishing. The carrot is that money saved by finding less expensive ways to publish could be returned to the author, via additional research and teaching support (1a). The carrot is also a professor's comfort in knowing he or she will never need to worry about using his or her own works again in a class or elsewhere without first having to ask and often pay the publisher to do so. The stick could include decisions such as not to renew an employment contract if a scholar refuses to keep copyright of his or her work or turn copyright over to their university or employing organization. This approach has worked with the intellectual property rights of patents, and it should work with the intellectual property rights of copyright. According to the U.S. Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8, the purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of Science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and inventions". (For the record I would note that there is no mention of publishers in the Constitution, only authors and inventors.) When print publishing was the only practical way for scholars to publish, transferring full copyright to a publisher was a logical and reasonable decision, since the publisher was the only entity that could undertake the broadest possible dissemination of the research results. Today, with the Internet this is no longer true. An even more important change is the fact that the data in much of the scientific literature are not being disseminated in a manner that is truly useful to the reader and researcher.
Rather than examine the transition from paper to what
the future journal will look like and how it will happen and operate, this
manuscript is being written to discuss a possible new model or
paradigm shift, that is, what may replace the current scholarly journal
for many areas of science, particularly chemistry. Just as talk about
faster passenger ships in the early 20th century was
rendered moot by the airplane, and as the Pony Express was
replaced by the train in the 19th century, I see the
likelihood of
these new forms of scientific repositories called electronic databases
replacing
much of the chemical literature as we know it today. In other words,
there will be a new way to
present publicly the fruits of chemical research which will be more
rewarding to both the person
creating the information and the person who wants to obtain the information.
This new way will
also be less costly because it eliminates considerable waste and
duplication, and gives the scientists
what they really want and need. This manuscript is more than words.
It is a plan to change and
improve scientific publishing.
User Requirements
While members of each group - authors, publishers, librarians, readers -
seem, quite normally, to concern
themselves with short-term changes and perturbations in their well oiled,
tuned, and
high-priced system, it would seem reasonable to step back from the
everyday and immediate
activities and take a strategic view of the goals of
these efforts and determine whether there are new ways
to achieve them. Products are only useful if they meet a need.
While airplanes are a 20th century
technology, the movement and migration of people serve a basic human need
that predates civilization. While the telephone is a recent
invention, speech is not very new - it was likely one of humanity's first
inventions. Today's publishers are like the carrier pigeon companies of the
19th century. They were the best at the time for what
needed to be done and they did an excellent
job.
In all areas of scholarly efforts the goal is improved knowledge.
The improved knowledge comes from excellent scientific research, which is
performed in universities, research labs, government labs, and private
companies throughout the world.
People who do the work want
recognition for their positive efforts. The global community needs to
document these efforts so that
future generations can build on these efforts and improve mankind
and our standard of life. In the past 1-2 centuries, and mostly
over the
past few decades, there has been a vast increase in human knowledge,
particularly in the area of
science and technology. Food, medicine, transportation, and other
fields have made enormous
progress. This great growth in information and knowledge has
led to considerable growth in the number of
books and scholarly publications. In chemistry, this growth in
information reported in scientific
journals has been staggering. While many think it is very new,
in fact, the problem is over
a century old. The Beilstein
Handbook (9) was conceived as a means to organize and classify the
considerable amount of organic chemistry knowledge that existed over a
hundred years ago. Chemical Abstracts was
started in 1907 (10) to help with the information
overload. In more recent times, Current Contents
(11), various handbooks such as the CRC Handbook of
Chemistry & Physics (12a) or the Kirk-Othmer
Concise Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology(12b),
printed
compilations, and databases of chemical reactions, toxicological data,
spectral compilations (such as the NIST Mass Spectral Database
(13), and so on)
have come into being due
to this information overload and the need for better organization
and access to data and information. These products have become very
valuable and highly desired in recent years.
If compiled, organized, and accurate information is what users require, it
would seem that the future needs would likely be better met by
providing this information in the
form most useful to readers and customers. Thus, I see the future of
scientific
communication, in areas such as chemistry and molecular biology, being in
the area of databases as a primary means of dissemination, rather than
scientific journal articles. Why publish, abstract, and
then extract when it can be done in one step? The reason that it is done
this way now is because
this is what people have been doing for a long time and most are
happy with the system. The
problem is that this is leading to a variety of system overloads, mostly
financial, and thus the system will
likely collapse at some time in the near future. It no longer makes
sense, technically or
economically, for an author to produce data and chemical structures
in computer-readable form,
convert them to a print journal, and then re-enter the information
into a database so it can be used
for studies, correlations, and so on. An example of such a product is
the JANAF (Joint Army-Navy-Air Force) tables, described in the next
section.
The New Database Journal
What I am proposing in this article is the structure of a
new model and form of scholarly
communication. In many ways its structure, organization,
and staffing is similar to that of the
current journal publication, but there are some critical differences.
Besides a number of technical
issues, there are serious political and financial issues that will have
to be solved.
What I envision as the main future repository of
scientific information in this new model is a collection of
databases, all linked together, wherever useful and feasible.
Certainly having direct hyperlinked access to a reference or piece of
data is much more useful and valuable than just a bibliographic citation.
Certainly these hyperlinks will make the life of a librarian considerably
easier and more productive
in that there will be fewer requests for locating and obtaining journals
and other sources of information, thus leaving more time for problems
that require a trained librarian. I definitely believe and
realize that not
all scholarly chemistry endeavors will fit into this database scheme,
since there will always be a
need for theories and high-level discussions and overviews of
different areas of chemistry, and science in general. Certainly this
article is one example of a manuscript that does not fit this new
concept, being an all-text article. There will also be a need for
articles with various forms of
multimedia, and publications such as the Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC)
(14)
will be ideal for these. However, in chemistry and molecular biology,
databases, which have
become so important in the past 10-15 years, will be even more important
and valuable resources and commodities in the 21st century.
As a specific example of how the new journals could work and look, I
will consider the Journal of
Physical and Chemical Reference Data (JPCRD) (15).
JPCRD, a joint venture of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Chemical
Society
(ACS) , and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), was first
published in 1972. The participation of these organizations is a
recognition of the key roles that the
federal government, the scientific community, and professional societies
play in the endeavor to provide high quality
reference data.
JPCRD is currently a bimonthly print journal. In 1996 its ISI impact
factor (11) was 5.82. The crucial requirements
for publication are that articles assess
the quality of the published information and contain full documentation as to the source of the
original measurements and the criteria used for selection and evaluation of the data. Monographs
and supplements to the Journal, which are articles too lengthy for a
typical print issue, are
published separately. The JANAF Thermochemical Tables, 3rd Edition
(16) are among the
best-selling monographs that continue to fulfill the constant demand for
data by the national
and international scientific community. However, in recent years
many scientists have asked for
their data in computer-readable form, which was yet another reason to
consider an alternative form of data publication and dissemination.
JPCRD was conceived and came into existence as part of an
effort to distribute standard
reference data to a wider audience. At the time the journal was
started, a printed publication was the
only method to meet the needs of the user community, a situation similar
to that of the Beilstein Handbook when it was first created and
published some 100 years ago. JPCRD provides a means of
systematizing and compacting the major components of
the primary research literature, bringing
together the research reported in widely dispersed journals, critically
evaluating the data, and
distilling the essential information
into a manageable product. In the 1970's the idea of having a print journal
to meet the needs of the
community was both reasonable, correct, and the only real choice. In the
late 1990's this
appears to be no longer true, as it was found in the late 1980's to be no
longer true for the printed Beilstein Handbook of data on organic
chemicals. While
subscriptions to the journal have decreased, as has been the case for most
journals in all areas of
science, the real problem that the JPCRD faced was that the high quality
of evaluated data it contained were
difficult to access and use in print form.
Today, as opposed to the 1970's, data are most often used in
problem-solving equations, which are parts of computer programs,
rather than the hand calculations of the
1970's. Considering that most of the manuscripts in the past few
years are sent to the journal
editor in computer-readable form, the notion that the only way to get the
data into a computer
program after the information is published is to re-type it leaves
much to be desired.
The initial discussions of what to do with the journal involved the
usual position of the
publishers, which was to create "pdf" and "html" forms of the journal and
make these available via the
Internet. This procedure would require the additional expense of converting
the print product to these
forms, and mounting the resulting computer files on a computer system
server connected to the
Internet. While this would make delivery of the information faster and
easier, it would not be
less expensive to do so. The additional costs would need to be,
quite justifiably, passed on to the end user.
From this experience, and similar ones with other publishers,
it is clear that the publishers are
locked into their current positions by virtue of the system that has
evolved mainly since the end
of World War II. The scientific community, up to very recent
times, has been well served by the
combined activities of the publishers and libraries
to handle what they create - namely more and
more manuscripts, generally of a more specialized nature.
The centralized system that has been created,
a large collection of journals, has become too big. It is too
unwieldy to continue to work well
and satisfy the needs of the scientific user community as
well as those of the library
community. Like massive and unmanageable political systems of the
recent (USSR, British
Empire) and distant (Roman Empire) past, it is likely to come apart and
re-invent itself in a new form
that comes closer to the needs of the community.
The proposed new JPCRD will comprise two parts. The first part,
Part A, would be a database of
properties of chemicals, which will be data and structure searchable.
Part A would most likely
look similar to an expanded version of the current
NIST Chemistry WebBook, containing many
more properties. The second part, Part B,
would be a database of supplementary information
about the property values in Part A.
Part B would look very much like a current journal
article, with authors, introductions, experimental sections,
conclusions, and references. The main
difference would be that Part B would contain the hyperlinks to the actual
data (which would be in Part A or in the
WebBook) rather than the data themselves.
Thus, Part B would not include the data.
Users finding data in Part A would also be able to
hyperlink to the actual citation and be able to read the
experimental and other sections of the
manuscript in Part B.
In this way authors will still be able to point
to a specific location (journal
citation) for their peer-reviewed work, or
add to their resume the fact that
their data is in the WebBook. Journal citations would be similar
to a current print JPCRD
citation, having a volume number and year, but rather than have a
range of page numbers, there
would be an article number, as pages have little or no meaning in an
"html" file. For example, printing the
pages out in the USA on 8 ½ x 11 inch paper would give rise
to more pages than printing out the information in Europe on A4 paper.
Also, as I age and my eyesight changes, I tend to use a larger font type so
when I print out this article from my web browser in 1998 it will take up
more pages than it did a few years ago.
As for the logistical process of handling and processing
material submitted by an author, the new
system being proposed for JPCRD is rather simple, involving the use of the
Internet and related
electronic technology, while still being grounded in the principle that it
must meet the needs of the user
community. The current or old system process, for all scientific
journals in general, is:
1. Author submits a manuscript (usually in electronic form on floppy disk)
* = sometimes this step is omitted
The new process and new system is proposed to be:
1. Author submits a manuscript and data in html/xml/sgml form to a web
site *
* = It may be desirable at the start to accept data in plain
computer-readable form (e.g., Excel spreadsheet)
While there is certainly a great deal of similarity and equivalent
steps and activities in both the old and new systems, there are a number
of fundamental differences, as noted below:
Similarities:
Differences:
To keep this manuscript and proposal as one that might in
fact be practical, as opposed to
a policy paper, the expected cost of this system needs to be stated.
The cost for the system administrator assumes the person will be a
full-time employee of either the U.S. government or a publisher and
includes overhead. While a full time person will be needed at the start
of such a project, after 1-2 years the work will probably not require a
person to devote full time to the work. The following is a list of
expected costs for the first year of operating the all-electronic JPCRD:
With an estimated expense of about $150,000 it should be possible to
recover the basic "out-of-pocket" costs from 500 subscribers (a number
considerably smaller than those who currently subscribe to the printed
version of the journal) by charging about $300 per subscription. It
should be realized that the costs are estimates, based on conversations
with commercial publishers, and do not include a variety of other real
and possible expenses such as sales, marketing, overhead, archiving,
and so on.
In the past few years there have been some features
of this new process tested and
implemented in some areas of scientific publishing.
Thus this proposal is just another step
forward, not a completely new approach or a technically untested procedure.
This author was the
Internet Column editor for the Elsevier publication Trends in
Analytical Chemistry (TrAC) from
1995-1997, which published 25 articles in the first three years.
All 25 articles were mounted on the
Elsevier server as soon as they were finished and were entered into the
normal Elsevier
publication system, which resulted in the printed article being
published some 3-6 months later.
Details of the process and how it worked can be found elsewhere (19a - page 211, 19b, and 19c).
The Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC)
(14), an all-electronic journal started in 1998, uses
all of the features of this proposed system, with the exception of the
database aspects, as the
manuscripts submitted to IJC are complete and independent entities.
Certainly one can envision
that when the number of manuscripts in IJC are large enough, the
collection will be a
database that can easily be processed to be searched, both by text and
chemical structure.
Other journals in chemistry that are both electronic in nature and
that are structured along the lines of the proposal presented here include
the Springer-Verlag journals The Chemical Educator,
Molecular Modeling, and Molecules Online (20). A list of all
electronic-only or online chemistry journals which CAS monitors and abstracts from is
available (21). While there are also a number of
electronic-only journals in other fields, only one will be mentioned here
as an example of how
the creators of this journal have carefully thought out the way this new
technology of the internet can be used in an effective and intelligent
manner to create a product that goes well beyond anything on paper.
This is the RSNA EJ Radiological
Society of America - Electronic Journal (22),
the online journal of the Radiological Society. The journal was
designed for many of the same reasons as IJC and the other chemistry
journals mentioned above, but
also it was designed to allow for interactivity use the java programming
language and cgi-bin script programs for the purpose of CME credits
(continuing medical education) via online testing and allowing
reader manipulation of radiological images.
Database/Journal Pricing
For print journals the mechanism of charging a
subscription fee for those issues of the
journal produced during the year has been a well accepted procedure that
has evolved over the
years. With both pure electronic journals and electronic
editions of print journals, the issue is
not so clear. Certainly there is a cost for such a journal or
database. In the case of JPCRD, even
if the U.S. Government provided free access, the funding comes from a
government agency budget,
which ultimately comes from taxes collected. The same is true of the
results submitted to the
journal database. The results come from excellent science being done
in universities,
government labs, and private companies. Someone is paying the salaries
of the staff, the
equipment used for the experimental work, the buildings that house
these people, and so on.
In trying to use the print pricing model in an
electronic product there are a number of
problems that arise. After deciding how much income NIST needs
(or in the case of a
commercial publisher how much it wants) to create, maintain,
and distribute the electronic
version of JPCRD, a decision needs to made on how to obtain these funds.
Even assuming some
percentage will come from the NIST/SRD (Standard Reference Data office)
budget, SRD is allowed by law to some cost recovery.
University publishing presses no doubt have the same sort of
financial situation. The model of a
yearly subscription fee allowing you to "buy" a copy of the
information for that year has a
number of problems in this electronic scenario.
How does one separate the data submitted during
one particular year? What happens if you don't renew every year,
but do it every other year or
have some similar sort of gap? What happens if you don't need the
information now, but in the
year 2005 decide to subscribe? Is it reasonable or fair to ongoing
subscribers to pay only the
subscription fee for the year 2005 and be able to get years of previous
data and results? How
can one allow access for only those "paid" years?
Perhaps a new subscriber would be charged a higher fee than a renewing
subscriber, just as those who update a database are often charged less
than those who buy the database for the first time. Certainly a flexible
pricing system can be devised, but it would make
for a very complicated system. A more likely solution would be
to pay an annual license to
access fee, which gives users access to all the information
whenever one subscribes to the
electronic database and journal.
If deemed administratively and politically appropriate, fees could be
assessed based on various factors. Profit-making
companies could pay one fee, while universities pay another.
Institutions in countries with less
developed economies would be charged less than those in developed
countries. The logic here
is that receiving a small amount of money from an organization in a less
developed country is better
than getting nothing from such an organization which cannot afford to
pay a great deal of money
for such information. In addition, promoting more and better science
worldwide is a good overall strategic goal for mankind and a financially
valuable goal for the organization receiving the payment for the
database access and
also allows scientists in these countries to have access to the same
valuable, high quality data and information available to scientists in
developed countries.
This scenario should lead to better science and scientists in all
countries. While not claiming that this
proposal is either acceptable policy to NIST or any other profit and
non-profit publishers, or economically workable, certainly a new and
innovative pricing scheme needs to be considered.
What has not been addressed above is what to do with someone who
wants access to just
a particular piece of data or just one experimental procedure.
Some charging policy needs to be
established for such occasional users. No doubt other general and
specific access and pricing
issues will arise as such a project is implemented. Finally, advertising
may be more plausible and likely to be a significant source of income in
electronic databases and journals, as discussed below.
Of course the real question is not whether this is a reasonable
technical and economic approach
and a well designed system, but rather, to paraphrase the line
in the movie "Field of Dreams"
(23), if you build it will they publish? With the
current system getting very close to collapsing
under its own weight (physically with there being no space to store
things and economically with the
rapidly rising subscription prices), time is running out
and new ways and mechanisms to perform
these well established and needed tasks need to be developed very soon.
Unresolved Issues
While the technical proposal presented here is a critical part of the
journal of the future, there are
other parts of this total system that need to be mentioned, and in some
cases, discussed. Since
these areas are both non-technical and involve much broader issues and
areas than scientific publishing, the comments will be brief. The topics
covered will be copyright, pricing, archiving, authenticity, and the
publishers of future.
Copyright is a great concern of publishers.
Much has been written on this subject and the reader
is referred to a number of these references (24).
Authors, and their respective organizations
have, for the most part, not considered this area a matter of
concern until just recently. As stated
above, while patents have always been considered a valuable
property (and part of the same section 8 of the U.S. Constitution that
allows for authors to copyright their works) and in most employment
agreements patents are owned by the employer,
copyright has been treated differently and
allowed to be given away at no expense to the publisher.
One of the reasons for this is that
authors are more concerned about acceptance and
recognition than direct financial
compensation. In fact I would state without hesitation that a lecture on
copyright will put a chemist to sleep faster than a sleeping pill.
Even today,
most authors do not consider the journals they read as having a cost
associated with them. In most cases their libraries pay for
the journals, so they are "free".
Employers, especially educational institutions, have not thought of
copyright as a valuable property and have
allowed the copyright to be given away without compensation.
With the rising costs of journals,
total and free copyright transfer may no longer be the case. In fact, a
number of world-class
institutions have started to re-think this issue (23a,
24b).
The Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC), rather than demanding
copyright assignment, asks only for a license to publish a manuscript
(25), which gives the journal the exclusive
commercial rights for journal publication. While
copyright ownership has been defended very strongly by publishers of
scientific and technical journals,
particularly the American Chemical Society (ACS), they
have never argued or even tried to show any negative financial aspects
associated with their lack of copyright on manuscripts
produced by employees of the U.S.
Government, as required under the U.S. Copyright law of 1976. With the
proliferation of easier
ways to distribute manuscripts, both before and after official publication,
such as by e-mail,
personal, and organizational web sites, it is likely that the proposed
copyright situation (i.e., a
license to publish) will be a useful
and economically
viable one for publishers. There is cause to argue that the real
reason authors go to, and libraries
pay for, a journal is that the product being sold is authentic and
is a complete collection of what has
been peer-reviewed and accepted for inclusion. In other words,
it is more convenient to pay the
publisher and be sure you have the real scientific work than to re-create
the total effort. This being the case,
an exclusive license to publish in a scientific journal, which would
keep another publisher from doing the same thing, is all that is
needed for financial viability.
Pricing, discussed very briefly above, is the second principal concern
of all three parties. Libraries
are concerned that prices are high and growing such that they will not
be able to afford to provide
the same access to
scholarly information that they once did just a few years ago. Publishers are
concerned about pricing because they have developed and implemented an
excellent economic
model (from their perspective), which is now threatened by this new
technology - electronic
information on the Internet/World Wide Web. Pricing is certainly a very
contentious,
controversial, and baffling issue in this area.
Whether it is a commercial business, professional society, or
governmental agency providing a resource, it costs money to create,
maintain, and distribute it in
any form. Pricing, economic viability, and success in publishing
have been able to evolve
over a few hundred years. The rapid changes and general upheaval
facing the scholarly
publishing field in the past few decades has made it difficult, if not
impossible, to develop, test, and evolve reasonable
economic models. While some have proposed going back to the author
page charge model, this does have its drawbacks. One reason commercial
publishers have flourished and expanded their journal choices since the
end of World War II has been their lack of page charges while many
professional societies retained such charges.
In addition to
the possible pricing proposals suggested above, there is reason
to believe that advertising might be a much more realistic, important, and
viable way to pay for some of the electronic
publishing activities. While there is some advertising now in print
journals, which is at this time very significant for a relatively few
such publications as
Science and
Analytical Chemistry,
one could envision both general ads, as
well as specific ads in the electronic journal and databases.
Books on a specific topic (like the
subject of the article you are reading), software to perform a type of
calculation in the article you
have requested, or databases related to the subject matter of the
article or information you are
looking at could be easily and effectively promoted in an electronic
environment such as proposed here. Such targeted advertising holds great
promise for electronic journals. With clever advertising and
marketing people thinking of how to use electronic media more effectively
than print, it is not difficult to imagine that new, exciting, and
innovative advertising will be a solid part of the electronic publishing age.
Advertising, coupled with the return to an author publication charge, could
both provide a low and reasonable price for a journal or database that would
please
librarians, and have the added incentive for the publisher that a better
journal would attract more advertising revenue and hence be more profitable.
Archiving is another paramount issue that needs to be addressed and
solved
in the near future. Libraries have acted as the archives for journals and
books for a very long time. Today the electronic editions of journals are
being archived by the publishers. The publishers have one thing in
common when it comes to archiving scientific information. They have no
experience or mandate to do so, and they all do it differently. While print
journals from different
publishers have some minor differences in the style for references and
citations, they have evolved with total inconsistency in their electronic
editions. They are all different. The computer-based search tools used
by publishers - they are all different. It is not difficult to
understand why an author would express concern as to the future access
and readability of his or her work given this Tower of Babel approach.
Libraries, which are bogged down with trying to preserve their current
print holdings, have not been given the necessary financial support to
develop the systems to support such journal archiving. It
may also be possible that libraries, like publishers, are not the best
qualified and experienced organizations to undertake this important and
critical task. To those who have used
computers over the past 30 years,
the inability to read LINC tapes, DEC tapes, paper tapes, 8 inch floppy
disks, and so on, is a real issue and problem. Not being able to read
this journal article, and the others published in this journal in 1998,
30 years from now, would certainly turn away a number of potential
authors. Related to the archive issue is the matter of the stability and
longevity of "url's". While the "url's" used and referenced in this paper
were correct and accurate at the time of the final acceptance of this
paper, regrettably they may not be accurate in one day, one month, six
months or a
year. Should each electronic journal spend the time and money to retrieve
and keep copies of all hyperlinks and url's to assure the value and
integrity of the articles they are publishing? (Of course, there is the
issue of copyright associated with this procedure.) These are very
serious matters that will delay the acceptance of both electronic journals
and electronic databases by many, if not most, potential authors.
Authenticity is another major issue that must be resolved. Authors
and readers (and patent lawyers) have to be assured that after a scholarly
presentation is received, reviewed, revised, and finalized and published,
the version does not change over time. Certainly errata by the author and
additions from reader comments can be added, but the basic original
material must remain constant. There is also the potential problem today
when there is a print and an electronic version, which are different (such
as having supplemental information or different graphics) as to which
version is the authentic one. As for a "final" electronic version, no doubt
with the need for electronic signatures for financial matters, this
problem will be solved and the scientific community will use such a
procedure and method. Electronic signatures could also help reduce the
time needed and manpower expended, which now is associated with copyright
or license to publish transfers.
Recently the
Association of American Publishers
along with other organizations have started to develop the
Digital Object
Identifier (DOI) system. The DOI is designed to be an Internet-based
technology that will help to create a mechanism for
authentication as well as protection of copyright and intellectual property.
The idea is to have a reliable standardized mechanism for identifying,
locating, and accessing digital information. A number of major publishers
have adopted the DOI system, but it is still in a test period and has
been since 1997. The DOI system claims not only to provide a
unique identification for content, but also a way of linking users of the
materials to the intellectual property owners in order to facilitate
automated digital commerce. The DOI
web site maintains a list of articles
about the DOI and related information. Not all people are
convinced that the DOI will work or that it is a good solution for anyone
but the publisher. According to Ginsparg (27) the DOI
"will allow (publishers) to lock people into using (their) database
to map a simple citation like 'Nucl. Phys. B432, 3 (1994)' to a cryptic
string of letters and numbers that no researcher will ever put in a
bibliography."
The last issue is who will be the publishers of the future.
For the most part universities, even those with their own publishing
entities, have
turned over the journal effort to commercial and society publishers. While
there are some university
presses, these have not been significant players in the journal area of
publishing and have not been pushed to be
journal publishing entities by his or her university management.
However, universities, a $250 billion industry, have
also been undergoing an extensive set of changes,
reordering and restructuring over the past few years. In
a recent issue of Business Week (28) entitled The
New U, the authors cite examples of
universities acting like companies.
Noble (29) has also recently written about
this change and "the commercialization of higer education".
Universities have become more business-like, with lucrative
contracts for their sports teams, and exclusive contracts for food,
beverages, and other commodities (1a) .
With distant (or off-campus) learning a feature that is happening now and
appears to be
a sizable role in university activities in the future, all university
assets are being reviewed for their financial value to the organization.
While it has been pointed out above and in reference (7b)
universities need to and are starting to act more businesslike,
their history in publishing is not encouraging. While many universities
here in the USA and Europe are starting to join together into consortia
for improved buying and negotiating power (for example, there is the
Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in the midwest USA and
similar groups in Europe), it
may take an outside player to make it work. One such outside player, not
mentioned before in this manuscript, is the journal broker who provides a
range of subscription management services. Companies
like FAXON, SWETS,
Blackwell's Information Services,
and others, play a very useful
role in journal and book publishing for libraries. One reason to think
companies such as these would be interested in such a business is
that there is a very serious question as to their future in this changing
world of electronic publishing. While it was once quite satisfactory for
publishers to not know who their customers were, so long as the orders
came in from subscription services, this is not longer the case.
Publishers seem to want to reduce or eliminate the role of these
intermediaries (as well as reduce the role of libraries if they can find
an acceptable way to get directly to the end user). Publishers are
contracting directly with their customers, either as
one-on-one or on a consortia basis, and are allowing only the customers they
"know"( i.e., have direct, carefully worded, and more restrictive contracts
for the electronic journal information than the corresponding print
journal information)
to have access to their Internet web sites. Under these circumstances
the subscription service companies may either have to re-engineer and
re-formulate themselves or perhaps go out of business. Certainly telling
the libraries, consortia, and university presses that "they can do it
right", save the end user customer money, and eliminate the need for many
publishers could prove very attractive financially for all parties, save
the current publishers. Besides the intermediaries working with university
and company consortia to become the new journal publishers, these
intermediaries could also work with the search engine companies to devise
quick, efficient, and accurate techniques to search all these
electronic publications, possibly becoming serious competition to current
abstracting
and indexing services. This would be one way to carry out a proposal
this author offered a few years ago (1a, page 210).
Certainly it is very hard to conceive a scenario
in the near future that includes both intermediaries - the publishers and
the subscriptions services - as large and powerful as they have been
in the past.
It may be that completely new entrants into the field of electronic
publishing will have the greatest likelihood
of pricing success because they do not have the enormous baggage of the
existing publishers, which
includes a large revenue base, copyright control of the information
submitted, and a large
organizational structure that may be difficult to restructure. However,
as seen in the business world in recent years, successful
innovators tend
to get bought out by the large existing companies, in this case
the existing large publishers. It is
very interesting in today's world of change and restructuring that the
publishers have so far behaved as if they are immune to the economic
realities of other businesses and industries. That is, the publishers have
come to a turning point and have chosen to go straight ahead. To some
extent the publishers have chosen this path and continue their old ways
of doing things because they have a customer base and constituency which
is demanding they support both paper and some sort of electronic product
for some indefinite period of time.
While there are those authors, publishers, librarians, and readers who are
willing to take the easy way out and do nothing but allow the current
system to make small incremental changes, I suspect the number of these
people is shrinking daily.
Certainly a solution will have to be found and it will probably not be
an extension of the current
print model. As Harnad has pointed out (30), there
is not likely to be the sort of hybrid print/electronic journal
environment that the publishing establishment would like, which would
minimize change and any disruption to its existing economic, social,
and power structure developed over many years.
The main reason is the radical difference in the operation of
an electronic environment. While scholars in the past have had
to go to publishers for
dissemination and distribution, the good and bad news of the Internet is
that anyone can be a
publisher. The current profit and non-profit publishers can't change that
fact. How they will adapt to this
new environment is a question that won't be answered here.
I can assure the reader that if I had a
solution I certainly wouldn't share it here.
Conclusions Restructuring the scientific manuscript into a database linked to
supporting and explanatory
textual information has the potential to be a more useful
and valuable product for
the scholarly community than the classical scientific journal, be it in
print or electronic form. The
proposed model for converting an existing journal, JPCRD, into an all
electronic database and
supplementary journal article is likely to produce a more valuable
product and one that is more
usable and accessible than the current print journal.
Acknowledgments
I would to thank a number of my colleagues who have commented on this
manuscript and
contributed to its contents through discussions and correspondence
(e-mail and paper) over the past years. They are: Steve Bachrach, Bob Badger, Steve Berry, Dotty Blakeslee, Pieter Bolman,
Bob Campbell, Mal Chase, Harry Collier, Gerry Dalton, Arnoud deKemp,
Ray Dessy, Tom von Foerster, Alex Fowler, Paul Ginsparg, Pat Kelly,
Neil Kestner, Gary Mallard, Bob Massie, Bill Milne, Andrew Odlyzko,
Ann Okerson, Rudy Potenzone, John Rumble, Keith Russell, Henry Rzepa,
Peter Shepherd, Charles Sturrock, Steve Stein, Bill Trefzger,
Wendy Warr, and Ron Wigington.
In addition I would like like to thank the referees for their helpful
and constructive comments.
(1)
(a) S. R. Heller,
Chemistry on the Internet - The Road to Everywhere and Nowhere,
(2a) For example, see the papers of Mike Lesk,
such
as
The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval
and
(2b) the papers of Andrew Odlyzko, such as A. M. Odlyzko
The Slow
Evolution of Electronic Publishing, in Electronic Publishing - New
Models and Opportunities, A. J. Meadows and F. Rowland, eds., ICCC
Press,
1997 and A. M. Odlyzko
The Economics of Electronic Journals, First
Monday 2(8) (August 1997) and A. M. Odlyzko
On the Road to Electronic
Publishing, Euromath Bulletin, 2 (no. 1) (1996), pp. 49-60, which
are available at:
http://www.research.att.com/~amo/
and
(2c) the
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography compiled by
Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
This selective bibliography presents over
600 articles, books, electronic documents, and other sources
that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing
efforts on the Internet and other networks
(http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html).
Last, also see
(2d) Sophie L. Wilkinson,
Electronic Publishing Takes Journals into a New Realm, C&E
News,
May 18,1998. This manuscript is also available as an ACS hot article at
the url: http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980518/elec.html.
(3) Two sources of electronic journals are (a),
New
Jour (http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/), an Internet based
archive for new journals and newsletters available on the Internet and
(b) the
ChemConnect (http://www.chemconnect.com/library/journals.shtml) list of
journals.
(4)
The following three (partial and edited) e-mail messages from the
Chemical
Information Sources Discussion
List (http://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/chminf-l.html) shows the
problem with electronic publishing when the publisher is more concerned
about control of scientific information than in the dissemination of
scientific information.
a. On 5/25/98 Louis Houle of McGill University (houle@lib1.lan.mcgill.ca)
wrote "Last week we ran into an interesting and frustrating problem with an
ILL request for the electronic journal of "MOLECULES ONLINE" from
SPRINGER-VERLAG. Our patron got the information from Current Contents
(his request was for a 1998 February article). This journal exists only
in an electronic format for the current year... Nobody seems to have a
current online subscription. We have tried ISI Document Solution (which
used to be known as TGA) and they cannot supply any articles from this
journal. We also got in touch with SPRINGER-VERLAG and were told that the
only way that we could get a copy was by subscribing to that journal.
We also wanted to know if by subscribing to Molecules Online we would
be (or anyone subscribing to it) able to fill any ILL lending request
from it! And guess what was their (Springer-Verlag) answer? NO WAY!
It seems that for the patron the only alternative is to get in touch
with the author and get a reprint (the old way of getting articles
for faculty)."
b. On 5/25/98 Kitty Porter from Duke University (kitty@chem.duke.edu)
replied: "We subscribe to the online version of this journal as well as
Journal of Molecular Modeling, another Springer web title. Our
Interlibrary loan department will not fill requests for either title
because of the Springer policy. It seems to me that a title that no one
can get will not become widely known or read (whatever the format) so
will attract few authors."
c. On 5/25/98 Dan Roth from CalTech (dzrlib@library.caltech.edu)
commented on the above two e-mail messages "If no one can read the
articles, no one can legitimately cite the articles, and finally no one
will want to publish in Molecules Online. I am a little surprised at
Springer's myopic approach."
(5) The physics preprint server was developed by
Paul
Ginsparg, and is available at: xxx.lanl.gov
(6) Philip Sirlin, The Economist, 9/30/95
(7) (a)
To Publish and Perish,
Policy Perspectives, 7, #4, March 1998. This manuscript is also
(b)
Reforming Scholarly Publishing in
the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective, J. J. Branin and M. Case,
(8) (a) The members of the study, "The Transition from
Paper," sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
funded by the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation are:
Steven Bachrach (Northern Illinois University), R. Stephen Berry
(Chairman, University of Chicago), Martin Blume (Brookhaven National
Laboratory), Thomas von Foerster (Springer-Verlag), Alexander Fowler
(American Association for the Advancement of Science), Paul Ginsparg (Los
Alamos National Laboratory), Stephen Heller (United States Department of
Agriculture), Neil Kestner (Louisiana State University), Andrew
Odlyzko (AT & T), Ann Okerson (Yale University Libraries), Ron Wigington
(Chemical Abstracts, retired); Staff: Anne Moffat (American Academy of Arts
and Sciences).
(b)S. Bachrach, R. S. Berry, M. Blume , T. von Foerster, A. Fowler, P.
Ginsparg, S. Heller, N. Kestner, A. Odlyzko, A. Okerson, R. Wigington, A.
Moffat,
Who Should "own" Scientific Papers?, Science, submitted, 1998.
(9) The url for the Beilstein Information System is:
www.beilstein.com
(10) The url for CAS is: www.cas.org
(11) The url for ISI is: www.isinet.com
(12a) The latest version is the 78th
Edition of
the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics available from
(12b) (13) Information on the mass spectrometry database
can be found at:
http://www.nist.gov/srd/nist1win.htm
(14) Internet Journal of
Chemistry (http://www.ijc.com/). Also see S. Bachrach, D. C.
Burleigh, and A. Krassavine,
Designing the Next-Generation Chemistry
Journal: The Internet Journal of Chemistry
which has been published in the Winter 1998 issue of
ISTL, the
quarterly publication of the Science and Technology Section,
Association of College and Research Libraries
(http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/).
(b) S. Bachrach, A. Krassavine, and D. C. Burleigh, End-User
Customized Chemistry Journals,
(15)
http://www.nist.gov/srd/jpcrd.htm
(16) The url for the JANAF Tables is:
http://www.nist.gov/srd/nist50.htm
(17a) Submitting files in html/xml/sgml should not pose any burden to
the author. Today there are web sites which validate html code, spell
check a manuscript, and even validate hyperlinks. A 1997 article
Validating HTML Code by L. Lemay
about such software (mostly freely available on the WWW) is available at
http://www.webtechniques.com/features/1997/04/html/html.shtml.
A list of
html validators is also available through the Yahoo! search engine at:
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Information_and_Documentation/Data_Formats/HTML/Validation_and_Checkers/
(17b) (18) Besides making information as quickly and
readily available to scientists throughout the
world, electronic journals allow for more easy submission of
science from Third World countries.
Many scientists in third world countries now feel very much outside the
mainstream scientific
publishing system. For example see Lost Science in the Third
World, Scientific American, 273, 92-99, August 1995.
(19) (a) D. C. Coleman, "A Chemistry Home Page on
the World Wide Web", Fresenius J. Anal. Chem., 357, 209-213 (1997);
(b) S. R. Heller,
Publishing on the Internet - A Proposal for the Future,
Trends in Anal. Chem., 15, 111-114 (1996);
and (c) S. R. Heller,
The TrAC
Internet Column - A Status Report , Trends in Anal. Chem.,
15, 251-256 (1996).
(20) The main url for Springer-Verlag is:
http://www.springer-ny.com (21) Online-Only
Journals Monitored by Chemical Abstracts is available at the url:
http://www.cas.org/EO/ejourn2.html.
(22)L. Ackerman and A. Simonaitis
Beyond Paper Images: Radiology on the Web which is available at:
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/RSNA.html.
(23) Field of Dreams, Universal Studios,
1989.
Also see:
http://us.imdb.com/M/title-exact?Field+of+Dreams
(24)
(a)Copyrights Highway - From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox,
Paul Goldstein, Hill and Wang, New York, 1994
(b) The Electronic Publishing Maze, pages 99+, Harry Collier,
Infonortics, Tetbury, UK, 1998.
(See www.infonortics.com)
(c)
Report of the APS Task Force on Electronic Information
Systems, Bulletin of the American Physical Society Vol. 36,
No. 4, p. 1119 (1991)
(d) ACM Interim Copyright Policies, Communications of the ACM, 38, #4,
104-109 (1995).
(e) S. Saltrick, The Pearl of the Great Price: Copyright and
Authorship from the Middle Ages
(f) D. J. Loundry,
Revising the Copyright Law for Electronic Publishing is
available at: (g) Academic
Writers, Academic Rights: A Draft Declaration January 1998, is
available at:
(h) D. L. Burk,
Ownership of Electronic Course Materials in Higher Education,
(i) A. Okerson,
Who Owns Digital Works?, Scientific American, 274, pages 80-83,
July 1996 and is available at:
(j) S. Harnad,
Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary,
and Copyright,
(25) The following two items are from a private
communication from
Ann Okerson, Yale University:
(a) Harvard University's copyright policy (adopted November 3, 1975;
amended on March 17,
1986 and February 9, 1998), affirms, "First, the policy should encourage the notion that ideas
or creative works produced at the University should be used for the greatest possible benefit.
This would normally mean the widest possible dissemination and use of such ideas or materials.
Thus, every reasonable incentive should be provided for the dissemination into use of ideas, and
the production and introduction into use of creative works or educational materials generated
within the Harvard community. Such a policy should be favorable to the concept that public
benefit should take precedence over financial gain, either by the University or the individual
scholar." (From the Introduction to the Statement of Policy in Regard to Inventions,
Patents, and Copyrights).
(b) A draft document currently before Yale University's Committee on Cooperative Research
offers the option of taking the public benefit notion one step further, by advocating that "Even
though the University advances no ownership claim to copyrights in most copyrights created at
Yale, it is nonetheless in the interest of the University and members of the University community
that copyrights be used to advance educational goals." (Introduction) This draft copyright policy
addendum then proceeds to address authoring and publishing situations in which "small markets
fail to define economic interests effectively" (e.g., specialized scholarly and scientific articles)
and recommends -- though does not mandate -- that faculty and researchers retain ownership of
copyrights and license to publishers all the rights they need to conduct
their business.
The benefit of keeping copyright ownership close to the creators
allows for alternative,
non-monopolistic forms of distribution (the researchers' web sites,
disciplinary sites, preprint
servers, as well as the formal publishers' value-added outlets)
and therefore of reaching many
more readers who might not otherwise license a publisher's costly
(though perhaps
highly-value-added) ejournal databases. At the same time,
licensing to publishers the
broad-based rights that meet their needs (i.e., including the materials on their electronic sites,
making links, giving non-exclusive rights to third-party vendors, and so on),
assures that the publishers do not need repeatedly to hold up their
production tasks to seek permissions
whenever circumstances may require additional rights.
(26) For general information see:
http://www.ijc.com/IJC/instr.html
(28) K. H. Hammonds, S. Jackson. G. DeGeorge, and K.
Morris, Business Week, December 22, 1997, pages 96-102.
(29) D. F. Noble,
Digital
Dipolma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (30) S. Harnad and M. Hemus
All or None: There Are No
Stable Hybrid or Half-Way Solutions
2. Editor sends manuscript for review
3. Accepted manuscript is returned to author for revision *
4. Manuscript is accepted by editor
5. Manuscript is edited by publisher's staff
6. Manuscript is typeset by publisher's staff
7. Manuscript is printed by publisher
8. Manuscript is delivered (mail or e-journal version) to author/user
9. Readers use library/online journal to get article
10. Reader copies desired information into local database/computer
program/application
2. Editor has manuscript and data reviewed on web site
3. Accepted manuscript is returned to author for revision **
4. Manuscript and data are accepted
5. Manuscript text is edited online by outsourced person/contractor
6. Data are transferred to programmer for entry/inclusion into (the
updated) database and adding of
7. Manuscript text is mounted on web server,
with option for local library to print and shelve article
8. Manuscript and database update notification is made available
(via automatic e-mail message) to
9. Readers access online journal to get data/manuscript text
10. Readers copy desired information into local
database/computer program/application
** = sometimes this step is
omitted
1. Authors submit materials.
2. Editor and reviewers review materials.
3. Author's individual contribution is recognized.
4. There is a cost for access to the resulting information.
1. Information flow is all electronic.
2. Information is delivered when available - no wait for a bound issue
to be printed.
3. Information is easier to correct. Errata are not "lost" the way
they are in print publications.
4. Reader and/or reviewer comments can be appended to the published
information making the
5. Newer data and references can also be added and appended to
6. Delivery of data can be customized for each user, such as
7. Reduced staffing for publisher (no mail room, fewer file cabinets,
smaller building/office,
8. No printing and mailing costs and staff.
9. No short or long-term storage and warehouse costs and staff.
10. Information is delivered to user more quickly.
11. Access to and usage of data and manuscripts can be more
accurately tracked .
12. Information is made available to entire world-wide
community at the same time.
13. Publisher, library or "entity to be named at a later date" is
responsible
1. Computer System, including
web connection
$10,000 2. System Administrator/
System programmer/archivist/
$ 100,000 3. Journal manager
(Part time contract)
$12,000 4. Editor/Editorial Board
(includes expenses)
$10,000 5. HTML/XML coders/Copy editors
$ 5,000 6. Contracted invoicing/
billing
$ 5,000 7. Marketing/mailings
$ 5,000 Total Cost
$147,000
The proposed plan discussed here is solely that of the
author and not an approved NIST plan and does not represent
NIST policy in any way.
For the Chemical Educator see:
http://journals.springer-ny.com/chedr/
and for the Journal of
Molecular Modeling see:
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00894/index.htm
and for Molecules Online see:
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00783/index.htm
(27)Paul
Ginsparg, e-mail communication of February 20, 1998.