Electronic Publishing
FOCUS vironmental
Science
&
Technology,
as well as portions of A N A L Y T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y ' S Fundamental Reviews,
in Analytical Chemistry In the last several years, advances in computer technology have had a tre mendous impact in the laboratory. But computers have also had an impact in another area of interest to chemists: the production of scholarly publica tions. Publishers have gone from hotmetal type to photocomposition, and there is currently a push to go from hard-copy to electronic manuscript submission. Electronic publishing has become a term familiar to most scien tists. According to D. H. Michael Bowen, director of the Books and Journals Di vision (B&J) of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the term "electronic publishing" has become a catch phrase for a number of different things. At last year's EAS Silver Jubilee Award Sym posium honoring George H. Morrison, Editor of A N A L Y T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y ,
Bowen described four areas that have become known as electronic publish ing: electronic advances in any area of conventional print publishing, avail ability of information in electronic form that is simultaneously or previ ously available in print (electronic re publishing), availability of information in electronic form that is inaccessible in any other way, and creation of special ized software. Electronic advances Although electronic advances have af fected all phases of the publishing busi ness, including the review, composi
tion, and printing processes, much of the current interest among chemists is in submission of manuscripts in elec tronic form. The potential advantages of electronic submission include im proved publication time, minimization of proofreading, and decreased cost of publication. Because of the recent pro liferation of word processors in the sci entific community, the ACS has had many inquiries from authors who would like to submit their manuscripts in computer-readable form, either on floppy disks or magnetic tapes, or by telecommunication. The ACS Books Department cur rently is working toward total electron ic processing of technical books. Meth ods have been developed for accepting computer-readable manuscripts, en tering them into the ACS computer, editing them on screen, entering type setting codes, and telecommunicating edited manuscripts to the typesetter. Recently an entire book was produced (in record time) in this manner. "But," says Bowen, "the book area is much smaller than the journals area. There are no more than 30 multipleauthor books per year, with about 10 papers per book, so that's only about 300 papers per year to process. But in the journals area, we have a very, very large system publishing over 10,000 pa pers per year. Before we start opening the floodgate to floppies, we need to be sure we can handle them." So far, sev eral articles that have appeared in En
have been transferred to the ACS in computer-readable form. "By and large," says Bowen, "we don't accept electronic manuscripts yet because of the high cost involved with the complexities in chemical writing, including chemical structures, Greek letters, and extensive super- and sub scripts. It's difficult to persuade au thors to put in some of the codes that even with standardized systems like ours will be necessary to really save money in the composition process." Lorrin Garson, Richard Love, and David Martinsen of the ACS Research & Development Department are devel oping software that would facilitate this process and are looking at techni cal word-processing software in an ef fort to obtain a better understanding of the software packages authors are us ing to prepare manuscripts for publica tion. (For more information on techni cal word processors, see the A/C INTER FACE on p. 1031 A). Love also has conducted a survey of authors to deter mine the most widely used word-pro cessing packages. This information will be used to develop a practical method for receiving computer-readable manu scripts and to capture text and graphic information. In a related effort, Jack Sanderson of Chemical Abstracts Service, Sandy Mamrack of The Ohio State Universi ty, and Marianne Brogan of the B&J Columbus Editorial Office are oversee ing the development of a prototype sys tem that allows direct input of coded electronic manuscripts into the ACS composition system. The system uses coding instructions based on the Amer ican Association of Publishers' (ΑΑΡ) conventions for journal articles, a sub set of Standardized General Markup Language (SGML). The prototype sys tem can convert author manuscripts from different word processors; au thors specify special characters in the ΑΑΡ or ACS representation. Simple ta bles and equations can be submitted simultaneously with the text for pro cessing; other graphics, however, must be handled conventionally. Other publishers also are working to ward electronic submission of manu scripts. For example, the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS) is cur-
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FOCUS rently setting up an IBM PC-XT system that will be able to accept manuscripts electronically for Applied Spectroscopy. According to Editor William Fateley, electronic receipt will enable the staff to do preliminary processing of the manuscript, such as logging the manuscript into the editorial system and preparing letters to reviewers. When the figures and equations arrive separately by mail, they will be added to the electronically submitted text, and a hard copy of the manuscript will be sent out for review. Fateley hopes that this system will cut down on the lag between manuscript receipt and review. Once the system is fully operational, manuscripts will be transferred electronically to the printer for typesetting and eventual publication. The SAS also is setting up an electronic bulletin board that will allow readers to find out in advance about the upcoming publication of articles in Applied Spectroscopy. Title, author, and perhaps abstract information will appear on the bulletin board, which is being implemented by Mike Epstein at the National Bureau of Standards. Currently, the bulletin board contains a message board for officers of SAS, a file transfer system, and a list of the previous year's articles and articles to come, although the latter is not in a database format and it is necessary to download the entire file to obtain the desired information. Epstein hopes to acquire a larger computer soon so that the journal information can be put into a searchable database format and more public domain scientific software can be included. Electronic republishing "Electronic republishing," says Bowen, "involves making available in electronic form something that is already available in nonelectronic form. In many areas, this is synonymous with database publishing, such as that done by Chemical Abstracts Service [CAS], The Royal Society of Chemistry, or the Institute for Scientific Information. The database is created once and the information used for a variety of products. In the case of CAS, the main database is used not only for the printed and microfilm editions of Chemical Abstracts [CA], but also for CA Selects [subsets of the main abstract database selected according to application], and CA Search, the on-line version of CA available from several database vendors including the ACS's STN International." Among the offerings of the Royal Society of Chemistry is Analytical Abstracts Online, which contains the contents of the printed version of Analytical Abstracts from January
1982 to the present. Most of these databases are bibliographic; they can be used to identify a document, book, or article, but they don't contain the actual document itself. But in the last five years, full-text files, which contain the entire document, have become available. For example, Chemical Journals of the ACS (CJACS), which is available on line through STN International, contains the full text of all ACS journals back to 1982. Full-text files have become possible only in the last few years, primarily because until recently the storage costs for such a large file (the CJACS file contains 3.5 gigabytes) have been prohibitive. These files have an advantage over bibliographic files in that they can be searched using natural language rather than descriptors, but searching them can actually be harder than searching bibliographic files because of the tendency to get a large number of hits. Spectral databases The electronic versions of spectral and chromatographic databases are of particular interest to analytical chemists. These contain spectra and other experimental databases that once appeared exclusively as published books of numerical and graphical data; some of the current electronic databases still exist as published volumes. "But," says Bowen, "many of these databases are better used on line than they are in printed form." The major advantage to having spectral databases on line is that sophisticated mathematical and algorithmic techniques can be used to organize and access data in the database, match unknown spectra to database spectra by pattern recognition and artificial intelligence methods, and generally make much better use of data than was possible with simple manual comparisons of experimental data with published spectra. (For more information on the use of spectral databases, see Gary Small's A/C INTERFACE on automated spectral interpretation in the April 1 issue of ANALYTICAL C H E M I S T R Y . )
A major product in this area is the NIH/EPA Chemical Information System (CIS), a collection of chemical databases, spectral searching algorithms, and statistical and mathematical programs, all of which are coupled through a structure system that connects the various pieces. Components of CIS that are of interest to analytical chemists include a mass spectral search system, which still exists in print as the six-volume EPA/NIH Mass Spectral Data Base, a carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance database, and an infrared search
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system. Management of CIS was turned over to the private sector in 1984 and is currently handled independently by two commercial firms: ICI, Inc. (Washington, D.C.) and CIS, Inc. (Baltimore, Md.). Future developments "Several emerging technologies have been touted as advances for the publishing industry," says Bowen. "The 12-inch optical disk was marketed to publishers a few years ago, but it was far too big to be practical for most people. The current hot thing is the compact disk-read only memory [CDROM], which would contain all the information that the publisher wants to sell along with indexing software. One advantage of the CD-ROM is that the duplication technologies have already been developed. A CD-ROM can also include figures and tables, whereas full-text files such as CJACS contain figure captions only. And," says Bowen, "the CD-ROM disk would physically be in the user's possession so that he could put it in his CD player and, with a personal computer, search his own disk with no telephone or connect charges. Unfortunately, however, the access times of a CD-ROM are quite slow compared to a magnetic disk." Recent applications of CD-ROM technology include Adonis, a project for optical storage and publishing on compact disk by a consortium of commercial publishers who currently are concentrating on biomedicine, and University Microfilm's Dissertation Abstracts on disk, which contains abstracts of all Ph.D. dissertations from 1983 to 1987. True electronic publishing, that is, publication of information in electronic form only, has not really caught on yet in the chemical community—readers still seem to prefer hard copies of journals. But this may change as access to computer networks increases and people become more comfortable with computer technology. "Publishing," says Bowen, "is an enterprise which involves a lot of people, starting with authors, and working through editors, reviewers, copy editors, publishers, and printers, until finally the printed book or journal goes into the mail on its way to the reader. And for every step along this route, there have been tremendous advances in the way electronics is inserted into the process. Nonetheless, for the most part, the end product looks very much as it did 50 years ago." Whether this will continue to be true with the advent of CD-ROM-based publication, true electronic publishing, and other as yet unknown technologies, remains to be seen. Mary Warner
