editorial
Dreams Realized
“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.” I wrote those words a bit more than 10 years ago in an Editorial in September 1997 entitled “Dreams”. I asked, “What will Analytical Chemistry be like 25 years from now?” Let’s awake from this dream and see where we are. I said: “For the authors of research papers . . . , 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.” No Internet crashes yet, just hackers and spam galore, but the electronic everything for authors is a done deal and a most positive change. Advances in chemistry and science come rapidly, and the efficiency of publishing important results should not be a rate-limiting step. I said: “For the reader, the journal will have a different look. Our A-page section will be a gateway to news . . . , research articles will be published daily, and their length will have been capped. . . . The lead report will be highly condensed . . . , with Supporting Information 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. Subsequent papers referencing the one being currently read will be easily accessed.” I was wrong here in that the economics of page pressure did not push authors’ work so severely into Supporting Information, but articles now do commonly have length restrictions in ACS journals. The rest did not take 25 years to thoroughly transpire! I said: “Subscribers and science libraries will be primarily electronic. Most libraries will have online subscriptions to the publisher or to the few central university libraries that have mastered the economics of maintaining broad electronic archives. . . . Libraries and paper will still exist, but paper reprints won’t.” I am amazed at how thoroughly libraries have embraced electronic publication subscriptions—although I know that there have been very substantial economic pains, and science disciplines have been more fortunate than most. It is now possible (for many, but not all) to conduct a major research effort and read the literature daily and never visit the physical library. The library in a new chemistry building at
© 2008 American Chemical Societ y
the University of North Carolina will have no journal stacks, although there will be remote stacks, and paper subscriptions still exist. I believe that the clock is ticking for the latter. I said: “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 amal gamation of publishers. The present world of ‘niche journals’ will have given way to ‘niche subscribers’.” This has already happened, in part, far more rapidly than I imagined through the aegis of so-called RSS feeds and various alerts. However, those systems have limits, because they require busy scientists to design keyword searches (usually less than perfect) and they don’t support “don’t send me any more of ____” (unanticipated hits). I believe there remain many unexplored avenues—including vocal search instructions—to help the journal reader find needed literature. The intellectual niches into which journals fit, and the journals themselves, will continue to exist because without them, there are no convincing models of how a community of scholars with appropriate expertise would provide high-quality peer review, which is at the core of publishing believable research results. I said: “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. . . .” This front-row question persists. The recent history of the mixtures of politics and religion confronting factual and logic-based science contains a troubling direction among U.S. leaders and some of its public—evolution and stem cells as examples. The need to vigorously defend the continuing importance of science and technology in improving human lives is perhaps as large as it has been within the past century. I said in closing: “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.” Most surely true! Chemistry publishing is truly living in the fast lane.
F e b r u a r y 1 , 2 0 0 8 / A n a ly t i c a l C h e m i s t r y
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