New Journals on CD-ROM Help Scientists To Build Personal Libraries

Scientific Journals On CD-ROM Proliferate The following scientific societies produce journals on CD- ROM or have active development projects in the works. For more information on society memberships or journal subscriptions, contact the societies directly at the telephone numbers given. American Chemical Society (ACS), Washington, D.C., (202) 872-4600 (Biochemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society) American Institute of Physics (AIP), College Park, Md., (301) 209-3100 (Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology) American Physical Society (APS), College Park, Md., (301) 209-3200 (Reviews of Modern Physics, in development; Physical Review Letters, in development) American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), Bethesda, Md., (301) 530-7145 (Journal of Biological Chemistry) American Society for Microbiology (ASM), Washington, D.C., (202) 737-3600 (Clinical and Diagnostic Laboratory Immunology, Journal of Bacteriology, Journal of Virology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Infection and Immunity, Microbiological Reviews, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology) Biophysical Society, Bethesda, Md., (301) 530-7114 (Biophysical Journal, experimental project in progress) Protein Society, Bethesda, Md., (800) 99-AMINO (Protein Science) Sitting at her computer, a biochemist studies an on-screen page from the journal Protein Science, published on CD-ROM by the Protein Society of Bethesda, Md. Embedded in the article text is a reference to a figure, with a special icon in the margin at that point. With a double-click of the computer mouse on the icon, a full-color image of a protein structure appears. A few additional commands allow the molecule to be rotated in space, tumbled in any direction, for a different view. Elements of the molecule can be selectively highlighted and intramolecular distances measured. The animated, interactive protein image is called a kinemage and is an eye-catching example of the new capabilities that digital publishing--especially of scientific journals on CD- ROM--now offers biological researchers. The added features extend the existing advantages of CD-ROMs, such as the fact that scientists can quickly search their electronic journal holdings by title, author, or keywords, which they cannot do directly with their print copies. Also, because of the large storage capacity of CD-ROMs--about 650 megabytes-- researchers building a personal library of journals on disk can save valuable space in their offices or labs. And CD- ROMs on the shelf rather than in the university library are accessible and complete--issues are never missing. In just the past few years, the number of scientific societies publishing journals in electronic form has jumped (see accompanying list). In addition, the sophistication of such publications has improved greatly over earlier efforts, many of which were little more than basic American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) files, simple computer text packages unable to handle equations and scientific symbols. Several societies have CD-ROM journal projects in development, scheduled to reach members soon. Although commercial publishers are interested in facilitating electronic publishing, in many cases it is scientists and their professional societies who are tkaing the lead in developing innovations digital journals. "I'm a working scientist," says Stephen H. White, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine. White also expends a considerable amount of his energies as the electronic publishing coordinator for Protein Science. "The only reason I do this is that I'm absolutely convinced that, at this early stage [of electronic publishing], working scientists have to be involved to create products that will really serve us well. This electronic medium has to be mroe useful and more convenient thatn the print medium. If we make it that way, then it will thrive. And if we don't make it that way, it will die." For the most part, the journals are being designed--and priced--with the individual bench scientist in mind as the user, rather than, say, academic libraries. Most disks, usually containing one year's journal issues, are less tan $100 for society members. Librarians, in fact, are somewhat skeptical of the CD-ROM's staying power as an electronic medium, anticipating and preferring journals to be published over the linked computer systems of the worldwide Internet, according to scientists and society officials. "Our concern was that this be a useful product to the researcher at the bench," says Walter Peter, deputy executive director of the American Society for Microbiologoy (ASM), Washington, D.C., which provides all 11 of its journals on CD-ROM. "We're a membership organization with about 40,000 members, and we designed these products for them. Not all libraries are entralled with the notion of getting subscriptions on CD-ROM. Most of them would prefer to have direct line or to continue with print." In time, scientific journal publishing is expected to graduate to the Internet. However, the virtues of journals on CD-ROM for individual scientists are likely to sustain the disks' viability for some time, according to scientific publishers. "People are talking about CD-ROM as an interim product on the way to an Internet interface," observes Charles Muller, publishing projects manager, in Woodbury, N.Y., for the American Physical Society (APS), which is headquartered in College Park, Md. "But CD-ROM is still a very practical way for individual subscribers to build a personal library, to be able to have many issues of a journal on one disk that just sits very neatly on your shelf." Muller notes that APS is working to develop CD-ROM versions of two of its journals--Reviews of Modern Physics and Physical Review Letters. One difficulty for the scientific user is that standards have not been established for the software programs used to search and display the information in electronic journals, as well as for the supporting file formats--although a few combinations of programs and file formats are beginning to emerge as dominant. "One of the biggest problems we face is that organizations that are involved in producing CD-ROMs all seem to want to have their own viewer interface," White points out. "You don't want to install a different search engine on your hard drive for each journal that you get on CD-ROM," says Victor Bloomfield, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, and editor of Biophysical Journal, published by the Biophysical Society, Bethesda, Md. "One wishes that there were some standards." Bloomfield says that the society is currently participating in an experimental CD-ROM publishing project with the journal's printing company to assess which combination of search and display software will best serve the readers. A trial disk containing three months of the journal was sent in April to a group of subscribers. According to Carol Gross, a research scientist in the biochemistry department at Minnesota who has been tallying responses to the disk, users want a more attractive and more capable product than they received, and the society is now considering alternatives. One combination they are studying would use a search engine called WordKeeper, from William Byrd Press, Richmond, Va. WordKeeper is based on a product called CD-Answer from Dataware Technologies Inc., Cambridge, Mass., and a display program entitled Acrobat from Adobe Systems, Mountain View, Calif. Acrobat creates its full-color page display from the PostScript files used by many desktop publishing systems and by many printers to typeset pages. This is the same combination that ASM will be using for its 11 journals beginning in January 1995. ASM has provided its journals on CD-ROM since January 1993, but using scanned, or bit-mapped, images of the printed page for display, which contain less information than do the Acrobat files. "We're going to use Adobe Acrobat files instead of bit- mapped pages, so that we will have page images on the screen with high-resolution graphics in place,S says Peter. "You won't have to link to a graphics file when you have a page image up. [Acrobat] takes the PostScript files that we use now for setting journal pages and emulates pages on the screen, which is a great advantage, because it's an all- electronic pathway for both the printed page and the CD- ROM." The American Institute of Physics (AIP), headquartered in College Park, Md., also uses Adobe Acrobat for its CD-ROM version of the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology. A different approach is used to produce Protein Science, with its kinemages. The underlying file is created using Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML. Some scientists and librarians involved in electronic publishing predict that SGML is likely to develop as the standard file format used by journals published over the Internet. Thus, they note, the choice of SGML to produce the CD-ROM may be a wise step if online publishing is the goal. A browser called DynaText, from Electronic Book Technologies Inc. of Providence, R.I., is then used to display and navigate the journal. Lightbinders Inc., based in San Francisco, produces the Protein Science disks. The same combination is used by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), Bethesda, Md., to produce its CD-ROM version of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. According to Charles C. Hancock, executive officer of ASBMB, the result is an inviting display of the journal with helpful links between the text and additional information or graphics. "When you look at it on the screen, it looks like something that's nicely printed," Hancock says. "It does not look like a word processor has been at it. It also has hypertext links, so that if you want to see a footnote, thereUs a special icon for footnotes--you just double-click on that [with the computer mouse] and the footnote comes up. If, in the text, you come to a reference--reference 24, for instance--it's in a different color than the normal text. You double-click on that and it goes immediately to reference 24." APS's Muller notes that the print version of Physical Review Letters is already being produced using SGML, so that the society will have the option of choosing DynaText as the browser for the CD-ROM version, although other choices are still possible. Muller says that additional factors might support the selection of DynaText. "[Publishers] can compose the master file for the CD-ROM with DynaText software on personal computer workstations," he says, "and then just send that master file to a CD [production] house. It's touted to be a very good in-house system of CD-ROM composition." The American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C., uses a proprietary software package called OPTI-WARE, licensed from Online Computer Systems in Germantown, Md., for the CD-ROM versions of Biochemistry and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This system presents scanned images of journal pages, but also provides hypertext links to higher-resolution graphics, as well as tables and other elements, according to Susan Barclay, assistant editor of directories and databases at ACS. Despite the capabilities of each system used to produce scientific journals on CD-ROM, the variance in technology is a limiting factor for the field of electronic publishing overall, scientists say. When journal publishing moves to the Internet, as it is expected to do at some point, the issue of setting standards will become even more important. "If everybody adopted the same standards, we would be able to read everybody's journals online," says White. "And that's what the electronic library is going to be about. Once all journals adopt the same technology, then the true electronic library will be a possibility." One reason CD-ROMs may be a more durable medium than some expect is that they are physical objects that can be bought, sold, and used in a familiar way. For publishers, important questions concerning control over their products must be answered before widespread publication via the Internet will become possible. "The problems of going online--they just haven't solved them yet," says Peter. "There's an ease of use [with CD-ROM]. You just pop it in like you would a floppy and run it, whenever you feel like it, for as long as you like, and you pay for it once. I'm not sure what the economic models are going to be for journals online." "This is a frightful concern for publishers," adds Muller. "And, as far as I know, nobody has a handle on it. Nobody knows how these issues are going to be resolved. When I go to conferences now on online publishing, many publishers are just shaking in their boots during the whole conference. They don't know what technology they should spend their money on. And whatever they spend their money on, they're going to spend a lot of money very quickly." "There are many, many questions about electronic publishing," agrees White. "Certainly, how to make it cost- effective for publishers is at the top of the list. The problem is that nobody has any experience, because it hasn't happened before." "Most of us feel that a few years from now we will be [publishing online]," says Bloomfield. "But I don't think we feel a great need to rush into it. "There's a lot of concern about how you get paid for the product. We don't expect to make a profit from the product, but we do need to earn enough to finance the editorial office, peer reviewing, and distribution aspects of it, so that we can't just give it away. The CD-ROM is great in terms of publishers being able to keep ahold of their product." Still, Bloomfield contends, Internet publishing promises such pronounced advantages over CD-ROMs that the questions demand answers. "Science is an interconnected web of communication," he says. "And it doesn't do to just search one year of one journal [on CD-ROM]. What you really want to be able to do is a much broader, interconnected search. That's why the Internet seems, in the long run, much more plausible." "In this world that we're in, the CD-ROM is a transient affair," says White. "The Internet is the future. Delivering the data directly is the future."

New Journals on CD-ROM Help Scientists To Build Personal Libraries

Sep 18, 1994

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