More CD-ROM Science Journals Available, But Has The Wave Crested?

Wave Crested? Author: Robert Finn SIDEBAR: Scientific Journals on CD-ROM When The Scientist last reported on CD-ROM-based scientific journals, the number of titles available in that format had recently surged (F. Hoke, The Scientist, Sept. 19, 1994, page 17). In the year since, there has been only a modest increase in the number of journals in the life sciences available on CD-ROM, and librarians and publishers are expressing skepticism that the number will grow much further, as online publications are expected to become the preferred electronic medium. While the boom may be over, however, scientists will find the journals now available on CD-ROM represent an increasingly useful set of reference tools. SPACE-SAVERS: CD-ROMs save on shelving, says Gerben J. Zylstra at Rutger's University. "Maybe if you'd rung up a year ago we would have said that we'd be putting many of our journals on CD-ROM. But we shelved those plans," says Nikki Groarke, senior marketing manager for life sciences at publishing giant ier Science Ltd. in Oxford, England. Of ier's 1,100 scholarly journals, only one in the life sciences -- the Journal of the American College of Cardiology -- is available in the CD-ROM format. "With the advent of the World Wide Web, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon to put things there," notes Lewis I. Gidez, director of the office of publications for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). "I think being on the Web will be more productive. Given the option of going to the Internet or the CD-ROM version, I'd go for the Internet." Jeff A. Hoerle, full-text product manager for New York -- based Ovid Technologies Inc., agrees: "There's certainly a lot more growth available in the online business today than the CD-ROM business. CD-ROM is a much more mature technology, and you can never put as much information onto a disk as you can in the virtual space of the Internet." Ovid manages an online service and this month is releasing one of the most comprehensive of the new CD-ROM products -- a set of disks that will contain the full text and figures of 15 of the most popular biomedical journals. Still, CD-ROMs provide at least one advantage over the Internet. Even a slow CD-ROM drive will display text -- and especially images -- faster than is possible through all but the fastest Internet connections. And CD-ROMs do have a number of advantages over paper journals. "I like them because I don't have to waste the shelf space in my office to hold all the paper-bound versions," says Gerben J. Zylstra, a Rutgers University molecular geneticist who subscribes to CD-ROM versions of two journals from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), Applied and Environmental Microbiology and the Journal of Bacteriology. "Plus, when I put a CD in there, I can search for a particular author or keyword going back several years." Ann Okerson, a librarian at Yale University, confirms that CD-ROM-based journals have their pluses: "It's a good storage mechanism for things which would otherwise take up a lot of shelf space. If they're well done, they can be easier to move around in than paper books." UNCERTAIN FUTURE: Yale's Ann Okerson wonders about CD-ROMs' archival qualities. However, says Okerson, librarians remain skeptical about the lasting value of CD-ROMs: "They are an archival medium of unproven length and reliability. Things like parchment and vellum will last for hundreds of years. We know that acid- free paper will last for several hundred years. There are now standards for microfilm in which microfilm will last quite a long time. For the digital media like CD-ROMs, I don't know that there are archival standards. How long does a CD stay good? What sort of heat and light and storage conditions do you need?" But worst of all, she says, referring to the unattractive graphics and clunky search engines of many CD-ROM journals, "some of these things really look and search like a dog's breakfast." Fortunately, few of the life sciences journals recently reviewed by The Scientist are that unappetizing. However, scientists who read several CD-ROM journals may find their hard drives filling up like a dog left alone with a mountain of kibble. Few standards exist for CD-ROM reader programs, and each journal seems to use a different one, with each reader eating up 2 to 10 megabytes of disk space. ASM's 11 journals all use the same interface, and one that, however slowly, is becoming something of a standard in the industry. It combines a search engine called Wordkeeper- based on a product called CD-Answer from Dataware Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. -- with a display program called Adobe Acrobat from Mountain View, Calif.-based Adobe Systems. Acrobat is capable of displaying a page that looks exactly like the printed journal page, with the same typeface and clarity of photographs and figures. Zylstra is happy that ASM has started using Acrobat because "printing is much faster and it looks exactly like a Xerox copy. It's just perfect." In addition to the 11 ASM journals, Heidelberg, Germany-based Springer-Verlag's European Journal of Biochemistry uses Adobe Acrobat. Another reader program that's regularly encountered in scientific CD-ROMs is DynaText from Electronic Book Technologies Inc. of Providence, R.I. Used for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Bethesda, Md., as well as for Virology and Methods in Enzymology, published by San Diego-based Academic Press, DynaText both searches and displays the text. And its search engine is a powerful one. One can not only search for single words or Boolean combinations (A and B, A or B, etc.), but also conduct sophisticated proximity searches (A within five words of B). The DynaText reader illustrates some of the advantages of the CD-ROM format. Click on an author's name, and a window will pop up containing his or her address. Click on an abbreviation, and a list of abbreviations used in the text will appear on screen. Click on a reference note, and the full bibliographic reference will pop up. Click on a mention of a figure or table, and that will pop up, as well. Many scientists like to highlight passages and write margin notes in the articles they read, and the more sophisticated CD-ROM readers allow for a version of this. DynaText provides for three kinds of annotations: bookmarks, notes, and hyperlinks. A bookmark is like a paper clip marking a passage, a note allows the reader to add comments to the text, and a hyperlink allows the reader to cross-reference one part of an article with another, or with a different article altogether. A new disk archiving all of Nature from 1992 to 1994 -- and available only to subscribers of the journal -- supplies an interesting variant on CD-ROM readers. Nature's cover art is often colorful and striking, and if one recalls only that an article of interest appeared in that issue with the hermit crab on the front, for example, one can click on a cover image and go directly to the table of contents. Although this is an interesting use of one's color monitor, keyword searching remains much faster -- and, after all, how frequently does one forget every single possible keyword or author's name? Some journals are using CD-ROM technology not as a substitute for the paper journal, but as a supplement to it. NeuroImage, published by Academic Press, for example, distributed a disk with its November 1994 issue that includes high-resolution images of slices of actual human and mouse lemur brains. Protein Science makes another innovative use of CD-ROM technology. As described in The Scientist's 1994 CD-ROM article, Protein Science includes "kinemages" -- images of protein molecules that can be rotated in space for a view from any angle. The software also allows readers to highlight portions of a molecule and to calculate intramolecular distances. Perhaps one of the most useful CD-ROM products now available is the Ovid Full-Text Core Biomedical Collection. Unfortunately, its high price and hardware-intensive format put it out of the reach of most individual scientists. The collection contains the full text and illustrations of three years' worth of 15 top journals (including Science, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine, for example). And it lets the user jump from a bibliographic reference in one article directly to Medline records or, if the reference is to an article in the collection, directly to the article referenced. But Ovid's Core Biomedical Collection costs a minimum of $4,500 -- compared with less than $100 for many CD-ROMs purchased with a print journal subscription. And that's if only one person uses the collection at a time. If it's networked to 20 concurrent users, the price jumps to $13,500. And it requires a somewhat unlikely hardware setup: It's currently supplied on a set of 14 CD-ROMs, at least two of which -- and preferably all 14 -- must be in CD-ROM drives simultaneously. Ovid's Hoerle explains that the company is marketing this product mostly to libraries, hospitals, and research groups that can dedicate computer hardware to this task. Although it is expensive, the collection may help libraries control their costs, if the alternative is to access journals online. "If you're on the online system, you have connection costs and charges, whereas when you subscribe to the CD-ROM product it's a one-time cost for the year," explains Hoerle. While using journals on CD-ROM does have its advantages, many people involved in scientific publishing regard it as an interim, transitional technology. Soon, they say, when high-speed Internet connections are the norm, journals are likely to adopt more or less consistent interfaces on the World Wide Web, and most of the benefits of the CD-ROM will evaporate. Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., is online at finn@earthlink.net. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #20, pg.16 , October 16, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

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