Editorial
Dreams
T
his month, Analytical Chemistry joins the ranks of the ACS journals accessible on the Internet. Some immediate issues of this auspicious occasion are discussed in this month's Focus (p. 551 A). The journal will need all its wisdom and the help of friends in the community to fashion the most effective dissemination of peer-reviewed analytical chemistry in this new medium. It's an exciting opportunity. Even with this important change just commencing, it's not too soon to strain to look over the far-away horizon. What will Analytical Chemistry be like 25 2ears from now? Considering that 25 years ago telephones had rotor dials and computers contained vacuum tubes, imagining how continuing data transmission and computer hardware/software developments will affect science publications 25 years hence is daunting. But I will risk some dreaming, admitting that it's a hazardous and disconcerting occupation. For the authors of research papers (they will still be around), the process of publishing a paper will have culminated into "electronic everything"; manuscript submission, peer-review (also still around), revisions, and even galley proofs will be transmitted over a system that the current Internet and, after crashing from overload, its successor will have evolved into. For the reader, the journal will have a different look. Gur A-page section will be a gateway to news, banks of state-of-the-art reviews and articles on education, and resources on international regulatory requirements for analysis and instrument specifications. Research articles will be published daily, and their length will have been capped by a reaction to the stultifying expansion of the overall literature. The lead report will be highly condensed and will contain only data that get to the key points, with Supporting Information (by another name) containing full presentations of data and details. Viewing panels will be so comfortably large that readers will be able to look at multiple pages simultaneously Sub-
tions to the publisher or to the few central university libraries that have mastered the economics of maintaining broad electronic archives. There are a few (although I hope I'm wrong and that there are many) surviving comprehensive central libraries that act as archivists of printed pages. Libraries and paper will still exist, but paper reprints won't. Individual subscribers may select a journal or a keyword-defined bundle of articles from one, a few, or the entire ACS stable of journals—or even from a larger amalgamation of publishers. The present world of "niche journals" will have given way to "niche subscribers". The many attempts at non-peer reviewed electronic journals will have evolved into the yellow press of science, in which opinion and fact are mixed. The soft and bad science articles on topics of societal interest in these journals will mislead the lay public and provide real science with much political travail. The real future of science journals is of course determined not simply by technological developments but by the economics associated with the value of the information in them and of generating that information as well as the stances that federal and international public policy take on science. A crucial aspect is the extent to which society continues to be convinced of the value of generating and preserving knowledge. Chemists and other scientists will certainly have to become much better versed in the immediate identification of technological impacts of new research results, and in communicating this to business and government leaders and to the public. I believe that this will happen It must I have probably succeeded in dreaming only 10— not 25—years into the future, if indeed any of the above occurs. The timescale of future change will most surely be shorter than that of the past.
New Textreferencing
the one being currently read will be easily accessed Subscribers and science libraries will be primarily electronic. Most libraries will have on-line subscrip-
S0003-2700(97)09028-8 CCC: $14.00 © 1997 American Chemical Society
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, September 1, 1997 5 0 9 A
