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ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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T
wo months ago in this space I encouraged readers to look at the new electronic version of ES&T research articles available on the World Wide Web (http://pubs.acs.org). I hope you will do so while access is free, and then make sure that your personal or library subscription includes Internet access starting in 1997. Now that ES&T has taken its first steps into "paperless" publishing, it's appropriate to revisit a longstanding issue important to printed journals: the length of research articles. Our research section has grown from fewer than 1200 pages in 1988 to more than 3600 pages this year. To keep subscription rates down, we need to reduce the cost of production, paper, and mailing. If the research section of ES&T continues to expand, we will not be able to do that. And increasingly we hear that the journal is becoming just too big for readers to handle. Our current editorial policy attempts to rein in the size of research papers. It states that articles should be "prepared with strict attention to brevity. The majority of articles are expected to be fewer than five published pages (fewer than 25 pages of double-spaced text including references, graphs, and tables)." But in practice, published papers are much longer. In the September 1996 issue, for example, the average article was 32.2 manuscript pages long (including graphics), or 8.5 printed pages. (The range was 5.1-11.3 pages.) This is an extremely difficult problem to control. Many good papers submitted to ES&T arrive much longer than 25 pages. Consequently, our editors, who are under tremendous pressure to handle more manuscripts, are forced to haggle with authors who argue that their paper deserves to be the exception to our policy. In addition, upon analysis, we've found that our 25-manuscript-page guideline is insufficient to keep papers to five printed pages. The growing size of ES&T raises some important questions about the research section: Is its purpose to archive scientific papers for later use, or is it to deliver papers to subscribers to peruse or study on a timely basis? To answer this question, we need data about how our readers use this material. For example, on average what fraction of readers thoroughly read any one research article within a year after its publication? How do readers feel about page length limitations? Some of our constituents feel that it is preferable to publish a few long articles rather than many short ones that increasingly look like scientific sound-bites. They suggest that our page length policy simply encourages authors to split a paper into two parts, which of course leads to waste, not economy. Others suggest that we need to publish more articles because more good environmental science is being done. Clearly, we have a dilemma. One possible solution could come from our new electronic publishing capabilities. To overcome the volume and cost issues associated with article length, perhaps we simply should not print the entire paper. Instead, we could "publish" the full text of accepted articles only on the Web and print only an extended abstract of the article in a paper edition, something similar to the News & Research Notes edition introduced this year. If a reader wanted to know more about the work, the full paper could be downloaded from the Web. Are our readers and authors ready for this type of innovation? Your comments would be appreciated.
Feature Articles (Type: Author feature) Quick Help (Type: Author help)
0013-936X/96/0930-465AS12.00/0 © 1996 American Chemical Society
William H. Glaze, Editor (
[email protected]) VOL. 30, NO. 11, 1996 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS • 4 6 5 A
