SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
MAKING THE COVER Scientific art on journal covers RAISES VISIBILITY, but does it still serve a purpose in the Internet age? STEPHEN K. RITTER, C&EN WASHINGTON
as most chemistryjournals now do. The graphical table of contents appears on the journal's website and is also used in print, in both cases to help draw attention to each paper. "With the increasing use of the Internet to access journal papers, cover art is going to become less and less important," Stang believes. "Readers are not always going to be looking at the journal cover when they go to a website." Stang allows that cover art has a useful purpose in highlighting research for specialist communities, such as organic chemists served by JOC or review-type journals such as Accounts of Chemical Research. But it's tougher to select cover art for a broad-based weekly journal like JACS, Stang says, where the goal is to capture the best research available in all areas of chemistry.
ONCE UPON A TIME, journal covers were can Chemical Society's Journal of Organic a dry landscape that simply gave boilerChemistry (JOC) when the decision was made plate information and served as a wrapper to start using cover graphics in 2001. But as for the important science reported inside. editor of JACS since 2002, he has decided to Technology advances in both graphic dekeep graphics off the cover. JACS is the only sign and printing have gone a long way in major chemistryjournal that does not feature changing that landscape in the past decade, graphics on its cover, and it's the only one of as nearly every chemistry journal now inACS's 34journals that doesn't include a cover cludes full-color graphical elements on the graphic. ACS also publishes C&EN. cover. Having a paper featured on a s journal cover offers such increased § visibility for the work that some researchers may try to influence the | "IDEALLY, one would want to showselection process by creating a spe- g case the very best paper of an issue International Edition cial graphic or using the art of self- < of JACS on the cover, a paper that www.angewandte.org in 20 years' time might win a Nobel promotion. But chemistryjournal 2nd November Issue 2006-45/42 Prize," Stang observes. "There are editors, as well as the editors of pre- £ challenges in how to select that mier general science journals such as | paper; sometimes it takes the perScience, Nature, and Proceedings of the ° spective of afewyears of hindsight National Academy of Sciences USA, are to realize the importance of a paper. accustomed to the ploys and pleas of This is just one of our dilemmas." researchers seeking to win a coveted The issue of fairness also comes cover and instead let the peer review into play, he says. One doesn't alprocess be their guide. ways want to select papers for the In addition, just as cover art cover simply because they have great seemingly has reached a golden age, art. For example, the biochemistry the Internet has become the primary community often has "sexy" graphaccess point for journal articles. ics in its papers. He asks: What if you What is to become of the journal want to select a theory paper that cover, when more often than not the only has equations and graphs? cover will not be carefully looked at, One also has to be careful not to or even seen, by much of a publicaHydrogen Peroxide Synthesis select only young researchers or tion's readership? J. l C.Fierroetol. the established "in people" of a parC&EN recently discussed these IronfVt) Nitride P.J. Chink ticular field, he continues. Likewise, issues with chemistry researchers Tsuji-Trost Altylic Alkylation for ACS publications, one wouldn't and posed a number of questions on WILEY-VCH want to select only U.S. authors but these topics to journal editors and include international authors as well. Each publishers. For 14 ACS journals, each issue features issue of JACS features approximately 60 a graphic tied to a research paper found "Cover art is a multidimensional issue," papers. If the editors select one paper to inside, whereas eight journals use cover notes Peter J. Stang, editor of the Journal of feature on the cover, "you have potentially the American Chemical Society (JACS) and an art from research papers but don't change offended the other 59 authors you didn't it with every issue. Eleven of the journals organic chemistry professor at the Universelect," Stang says. have a standard designed graphic that sity of Utah. "One has to look at it from the doesn't change. For example, Organic LetThere's also the technical issue of properspective of the author, but also from the ters has featured the same set of methane ducing a cover, which takes time and can perspective of the reader and the broader molecules on the cover since the journal cost several thousand dollars, he adds. chemistry community, as well as the perdebuted in 1999. Featuring a paper on the cover automatispective of the journal editor and the jourcally delays its publication while the cover During Stang's tenure, JACS started nal production process," he says. art is being prepared. Several researchers requiring authors to submit a structure Stang knows firsthand how cover art imtold C&EN that they submit papers to JACS or other graphic for the table of contents, pacts a journal. He was editor of the Ameri-
Chemie
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ACIEFS 45 (42) 6935-0000(3006)
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over other premier chemistry journals because of the faster publication process. In addition, a whole new process and a full-time staff member would be required just to coordinate the cover for JACS, Stang points out. "Given the ability to access journals on the Web, and weighing the pluses and the minuses, on balance I am not so sure putting cover art on ajournai like JACS is worth the effort and cost," Stang concludes. "We tell authors that a good table of contents graphic and a good title will go a long way toward attracting attention and is now much more important than any cover art." Angewandte Chemie and its all-English international edition, both published by Wiley-VCHforthe German Chemical Society, are a pair of weekly journals that face the same set of dilemmas as JACS. But Angewandte Chemie has featured art on its cover since 1979. "These cover issues go to the heart of scientific publishing, which has to serve readers in the first place," comments Peter Gôlitz, editor-in-
chief of Angewandte Chemie since 1982. "As an editor, you have the obligation to first sift the wheat from the chaff, with the help of referees, and then present the accepted manuscripts to the readers in a way that allows them a speedy information uptake but also stimulating browsing," Golitz says. "With cover art, you want to achieve just that: Attract readers, pull them into the journal, and let them read." On the other hand, once a paper is accepted, "I feel obliged to ensure that it gets the highest possible attention for the benefit of the author, whether it is featured on the cover or not," he points out. So when the sheer volume of published material in chemistry and in other disciplines started to get out of hand for readers, journals had to think of ways to help them, Golitz says. One way to do so was the advent of the graphical table of contents. u Angewandte Chemie was the first journal, as far as I know, to implement these graphical abstracts in the mid-1970s to allow readers to grasp the gist of a manuscript quickly," Golitz explains. "Graphical abstracts, in our case, mean a well-crafted text accompanied by a didactically wellchosen picture." Another way Angewandte Chemie tries to guide readers is to flag papers as "very important papers" (VIPs) or as "hot papers." For VIPs, two referees must have qualified the results as 'Very important," Gôlitz notes. Hot papers are "very good papers in busy areas" in which one referee usually has qualified the manuscript as very important. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) also uses a hot papers designation for many of its journals. JACS doesn't highlight hot papers, in part for the reasons of fairness Stang mentions, but about half of AC S j ournals feature a hot papers section on their websites. As far as the influence a nice graphic or an author may have on the cover selection process, the reading of a manuscript by an editor, the refereeing, WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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