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Editors' Column
Electronic Manuscripts— One Step Closer
The Review issue this year had two papers that swept through the editori al and production cycle in soft-copy form. The author of one of these, Bob McDonald, was no stranger to the pro cedure—he had been the first author to submit a review to ANALYTICAL C H E M I S T R Y in electronic form, and one of his papers triggered an EDI TORS' COLUMN on this subject eight years ago. Eight years ago—and only one addi tional author, Michael Delaney, has made use of the technology and the capability. Why? One of the reasons is obvious—we have not widely publicized to authors our ability and our willingness to pro cess manuscripts submitted in softcopy form. The Delaney review was a case in point—it was the author who approached us. He asked what the benefits were and how he should pro ceed. For a review article, the benefits are great: minimal rekeying of material at the production input stage, rapid turnaround time, and minimal proof ing at the galley stage. However, these benefits are achieved at a cost: a rigid protocol of manuscript input, using generic tagging for major components of the paper (identifying titles as such, authors as such, contribution lines as such; identifying section heads, para graphs, reference citations; etc.), add ing specific coding for font changes, position changes, and special charac ters (boldface and italic, superscripts and subscripts, Greek letters, and nonstandard symbols), and following strict format requirements (9-track, 1600-bpi magnetic tape with ASCII [American National Standard Code for Information Interchange] charac ters and specific record size). To suc ceed, the process requires patience and understanding; mastering the re quirements would serve one in good stead for subsequent manuscript sub
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mission to the same publisher—but only to the same publisher! Why? ASCII character sets are in ternational standards and magnetic tape input causes little difficulty. But publishers and composition houses do not have international, or even nation al, standards, and magnetic tapes are more unwieldy than disks, diskettes, or cassettes, where formats vary wide ly. Until some uniformity is achieved, an author will find his task difficult and his benefits minimized; a publish er will incur additional expense by making more hardware expenditures, using conversion bureaus, or taking al ternative methods to cope with the problems. The solution is implicit in the state ment of the problem—standardiza tion. But the need for standardization is easier to identify than the result is to achieve. However, progress is being made. The Association of American Publishers (ΑΑΡ) (of which the Amer ican Chemical Society is a member) is sponsoring a project on electronic manuscript input, attempting to iden tify the needs of the entire publication community—author, publisher, user (both individual and library)—and to recommend standards to fill those needs. ACS is cooperating in this ef fort; if successful, the benefits that ac crue to authors of reviews should spill over to the rest of the publication cycle. Scientific publishing creates special challenges that a general-purpose ef fort may not address. The wide use of equations and structures and the spe cial characters inherent throughout are but two illustrations of these chal lenges. The ΑΑΡ effort is being com plemented by an ACS effort to ad dress these and other points, so that in 1985 some original research papers may join reviews in the electronic stream. Marianne Brogan
