FEBRUARY 1998 VOLUME 11, NUMBER 2 © Copyright 1998 by the American Chemical Society
Editorial American Chemical Society JournalssThe Best Place To Publish I just returned from the annual meeting of Editors of American Chemical Society journals. This year’s meeting was the most exciting one of the ten I’ve attended, and I wanted to pass on some of my impressions. For the past few years, the ACS has been making substantial investments in technology to prepare for the coming electronic revolution in publishing. Well, the revolution is here, and the ACS is at the frontier. The principal beneficiaries of ACS’s investment are the readers of ACS journals and the authors who publish in them. As I mentioned a few months ago in an editorial [Chem. Res. Toxicol. 10 (11), 1215, 1997], all 26 ACS journals are now available on the World Wide Web, and the capabilities of the Web versions of the journals are just amazing! I was a little slow to get on this train, but I’m convinced we are experiencing a sea change in scientific publishing, and I want our authors to be aware of it so they can exploit the Web’s full potential. The Internet versions of all ACS journals contain PDF and HTML files of each article. Internerds know that the PDF file allows one to download and print exact reproductions of articles as they appear in the journal. Most publishers that mount Internet versions of their journals provide the PDF version. But it’s the HTML versions that have the real action! ACS makes the full text of all HTML articles searchable and inserts hyperlinks in each article to other Web sites such as GenBank and the Protein Data Bank. This enables one to access and download nucleic acid and protein sequences and three-dimensional protein structures that can be manipulated in real time while one is reading the article. Hyperlinks between the article and National Library of Medicine’s PubMed and ACS’s ChemPort allow one to access abstracts through Medline and Chemical Abstracts and to conduct searches for related articles. Thus, one can trace the evolution of a field without leaving one’s chair (except for the occasional cup of coffee).
Each HTML article is linked to all the Supporting Information that an author cares to submit. This could include color photographs of illustrations that are published in black and white in the print version (at no cost to the author), all the HPLC traces and NMR spectra that one wants to archive, and Quick Time movies of molecules rocking and twisting in real time. We’ve all seen molecular dynamics simulations of DNA molecules that look like hairy spirals when viewed from the static perspective of a printed journal page. (Can you really figure out what’s going on by looking at those things?) Now authors can submit a movie as Supporting Information that accurately conveys the molecular motion, and all our Internet readers can view it while they are reading the article. Perhaps the biggest enhancement from an author’s standpoint is a feature called ASAP, which stands for As Soon As Publishable. Every night, the ACS mounts electronic versions of corrected proofs that they’ve received from authors. This means that your article will be generally available on the Web weeks before the actual print version of Chemical Research in Toxicology appears. Talk about fast-tracking articles! Right now Chemical Research in Toxicology has one of the fastest turnaround times in scientific publishing. The average full paper appears 23 weeks after it is submitted. This includes the time for initial review, author revision, re-review, electronic composition, and journal publication. My guess is that ASAP will shorten this overall process by about 4 weeks; for some articles it will be a little more, for some a little less. This means the average full paper submitted to Chemical Research in Toxicology will be peer-reviewed and published in less than 5 months. Communications will appear even faster because they are already reviewed more quickly and are moved to the head of the queue for composition.
S0893-228x(98)00499-8 CCC: $15.00 © 1998 American Chemical Society Published on Web 02/16/1998
86 Chem. Res. Toxicol., Vol. 11, No. 2, 1998
The amazing thing is that all of these features are available right nows6 months after the ACS first mounted their journals on the Internet. The ACS Advanced Technology Department has worked super hard to put the technology in place, and the folks in the Journals Department in Columbus, OH, have really hustled to make the transition from an issue-based system to a document-based system. But no one is congratulating themselves; ACS is already working on additional enhancements. One can only salivate at the possibilities. It’s fun and exciting to be involved in this revolution
in scientific publishing. I challenge all of our authors to stretch their imaginations and come up with new ways to enhance the information content and impact of their articles. And I challenge all of our readers to get on board and subscribe to the Web version of Chemical Research in Toxicology.
Lawrence J. Marnett Editor TX980499Z
