EDITORIAL
UNESCO MEETING OF EDITORS It was my privilege to represent the American Chemical Society a t the symposium of editors of documentation, library, and archive journals on May 16-18, 1972, in Paris, France. The symposium was sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and was attended by about 50 editors. The purpose of the meeting was t o explore areas of potential cooperation among editors and coordination of solutions to mutual problems, and to provide a forum for ideas and suggesions towards improving our journal literature. One major problem was evident from almost the very beginning of the meeting. Outside of the meeting room, UNESCO had arranged a skillful display of about 260 periodicals of interest to documentalists, information scientists, librarians, and archivists throughout the world. The differences among these periodicals in terms of subject scope, editorial standards, and relevancy to professional aspects covered a spectrum best visualized as approaching the two terminals of a 0-100 scale. These differences were further exaggerated among the attendees whose responsibilities ranged from editors of news bulletins to editors of periodicals addressed t o the working world of file clerks, periodicals within a special library category (e.g., music), library resources, and research pertinent to librarians, to a few editors of journals devoted to research and development, and to editors of indexing and abstracting services. Despite the diversities noted above, there was general agreement that the content and editorial format of many of our journals need improving. Although the most effective mechanism for maintaining the quality of published papers is the referee system, this Journal is almost unique in this practice for all papers received. Critics of the referee system contend that it delays unduly the publication of papers, but this is contrary to my experience (the major delay for this Journal is the author in revising the paper in response to comments by the referees). I am completely in sympathy with high selection standards and with the policy of publishing only new and original contributions (at least for this Journal and others which purport to be R&D oriented). Whereas standards for content may vary from journal to journal (and actually do), editorial standards can be consistently maintained providing these standards are known. Editorial standards include those practices concerned with the proper identification of the journal on its cover (including use of CODEN), table of contents, good titles, complete mailing address of authors, abstract with each paper, proper use of abbreviations and identification of acronyms, proper reference citations, and volume indexes. Editorial standards such as these can be set easily and has been one of UNESCO’s responsibilities, and UNESCO
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will make a greater effort to communicate these standards to all editors. Other standards suggested, such as all journals publishing abstracts in three languages and placing abstracts in a card tear-out form, were received with varying degrees of resistance. Despite the value of abstracts in three languages, I pointed out the linguistic difficulty that I would have in getting the abstracts into two other languages and that the additional space consumed would increase the cost of producing the journal (or else result in decreasing the number of papers published). I doubt whether many journals could overcome the linguistic difficulty and the increase in cost. I questioned the advisability of separating abstracts from the paper, particularly for the subscribers to the journal. Considerable attention was focused on indexing and abstracting services. Currently there are four abstract services: Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), Referatiunyj Zhurnal: Informatics (RZI), Information Science Abstracts (ISA), and, most recently Bulletin Signalgtique (BS). Of these four, three are in English (includes RZI, which since 1967 has been issued as the English version of RZ, the Russian version) and one in French. Each publishes about 3000-4000 abstracts per year and covers about 250-300 journals. There is some overlap among them, but much less than I had thought possible: there are only 51 journals in common among LISA, RZI, and ISA; there are 98 journals in common between LISA and ISA; LISA, RZI, and ISA cover a total of about 600 different journals. These data prompt the question: What is the true literature in this area? Timeliness of the abstracting services is of questionable merit, ranging from 3-4 months for LISA to about one year for ISA, with RZI in between. The situation in the indexing and abstracting sector resulted in the recommendation that UKESCO study the problem relative to the world primary literature in the field. In retrospect, this was a meaningful meeting in that it emphasized the great diversity of the journal literature embracing the different interests of those who handle and work with the total literature, whether they are librarians, information scientists, archivists, or scholars and scientists who are heavy users of the literature. Until we can differentiate these diverse interests into viable journals and secondary indexing and abstracting services, we will have to live with an uncontrolled literature, and the major part of the problem is that we are not really sure what the problems are, even though many want t o work on the solutions. HERMAN SKOLNIK
