On Electronic Publishing and Reading by the Fireside
T
his editorial is about electronic publishing in chemistry, but it was stimulated by a radio newscast on public news dissemination. The interviewee on the newscast was discussing the dissemination of news by TV versus by electronic media such as Internet news services. In a blatantly self-serving way, he ho-hummed a recent proposed buyout of a major U.S. TV network, saying that TV as a news medium will be made irrelevant by electronic news services (presumably those on the Internet and accessed by PCs and ultimately those piped to home TV screens). Other competing business enterprises will provide news services, finding new and different ways to bill the consumer (my comment, not his). The information highway actually started with the radio and, even in the early radio days, its future role in public news dissemination was unclear and disputed. Ditto TV, and we stand yet again in a similar posture before the Internet, with renewed uncertainties and debate. The future of electronic dissemination of chemical information contains strongly analogous uncertainties and reasons for debate. Electronic publishing of chemical information is like a slowly opening flower. We see it in an already advanced state in electronic composition of research manuscripts and in authors' submission of rnanuscripts on diskette. Nearly everyone is preparing their manuscript for publication on some form of PC. Even though manuscripts continue to be sent hardcopy by mail to reviewers, most of our reviewers reply by fax, and eventually email will become important. Already powerful methods for searching the literature promise to become even more so. I and my students have greatly benefited from the current awareness and retrospective literature-searching ability of
electronic databases, and I hold this as a precious exarnple of electronic advances. Chemistry journals are increasingly available through online services, and the technology of their presentation is undergoing rapid advances. Online publishing of chemical information is where the analogy to public news service becomes very real. There are many uncertainties in both: in how the economics will work out to sustain the news supplier (the publisher of chemistry research) yet be affordable to the consumer (the chemist), in what (the chemistry) is an acceptable and desirable form of delivery to the consumer, in how editors can maintain the quality of the news product (the veracity of the chemistry publication), and in whether the concurrent and continued existence of the printed newspaper (the printed research journal) can be assumed. Literally none of these are truly settled issues, nor are they likely to be soon. I will close with a one-person opinion poll (by me) about the last issue, of continuing print information. Calling up journal articles online or from a CD is fantastic when you want a piece of information in a hurry, but trying to fully digest a journal article on a PC screen is, to me, not very attractive. If I have a meaty paper by one of my many favorite analytical chemist authors, I want to be able to sit by the fireside, highlight its words, write Wow! or Hah! or ? in the margins, and chew on the comers. I do not look forward to losing access to a printed version of the research article (or of the newspaper) and hope that the evolution of electronic publishing accommodates such human foibles.
Analytical Chemistry, September 1, 1995 523 A
