Publishers Work Toward Starting Reputable Online Science Journals

Technical and cultural concerns hamper the full-scale launching of an innovative vehicle to relay scientific results Plans to bring science publications into the computer age are making slow but steady progress as individuals, academic associations, and publishers investigate the feasibility and economics of producing journals electronically. These online "publications" of peer-reviewed research articles will be circulated to scientists either directly, through existing computer networks that are accessible to most academics in the United States, or through online computer library centers. Ironically, though much of U.S. science is conducted at the cutting edge of technology, the only successful online, peer-reviewed journals to date come from nonscientific scholarly disciplines in the humanities or social sciences. Among those publications in the works for scientists is an electronic journal by the Washington, D.C.-based American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), which also publishes Science. In this venture, AAAS is collaborating with the Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a computer library service and research organization whose computer network and products link more than 10,000 libraries in 39 countries. AAAS and OCLC expect to launch the venture in 1992. Another new electronic peer-reviewed journal is the Chicago Journal of Computer Science. Editors at Nature, published by Macmillan Magazines in London, say they have also looked into online publishing but will wait to see the outcome of the AAAS venture. Online Benefits Scientists interviewed for this article say they look forward to calling up a journal on their personal computer screen and printing it out, or responding to it immediately. "The advantage of an electronic journal over a print one is lower cost, speed, and a means of access and searchability," says Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate in biology and former president of Rockefeller University in New York. "It also allows a continued dialectic on an article which cannot occur in print." An ongoing dialogue in the form of letters often does not occur in print journals because of page publication costs. But comments to an electronic paper could be referred to in all future transmissions of the article in a peer-reviewed or unexpurgated fashion, says Lederberg. Such benefits notwithstanding, efforts to begin online scientific publishing thus far have met with major problems or detractors. Planners for these publications struggle with resistance from scientists who worry whether the integrity of scientific data and their presentation will be compromised. Another major obstacle is the technology's current inability to inexpensively transmit graphic images over an electronic network. Potential investors also worry about the profitability of such ventures. Even so, publishers such as the University of Chicago's Michael O'Donnell are continuing efforts to get their science journals up and running. If O'Donnell gets the financial support he is seeking, he hopes to send the Chicago Journal of Computer Science to scientists' offices at no charge through the computer networks INTERNET and BITNET. After peer review of submitted articles is finished, he will send an electronic mail message of the table of contents to his subscribers. They then can transfer any file they want to their own computer. O'Donnell will maintain the archive of the text. He has overcome any image transmission problems by deciding not to send any detailed pictures. This doesn't present a problem for the credibility of his journal because photos are rarely used in his discipline, he says. O'Donnell anticipates his journal will be seen as radical by some because the look of the end product is sure to vary substantially from reader to reader--a situation dramatically different from print journals. How different it looks, says O'Donnell, will depend on the software his readers use to print it and what format they choose. For example, one reader may want to print out symbols in the Greek uppercase alphabet, while others may want lowercase. O'Donnell says this concept is difficult to accept for some scientists who are accustomed to uniform and unchangeable print literature. "Whenever there is a discussion of refereed electronic scientific journals, there are many scientists that say that the end product should be absolutely consistent and that it should be a replica of the printed page--anything less isn't quite good enough," says O'Donnell. "It is what they know and what they are used to, but I don't think those criteria are entirely necessary.'' Content Counts For O'Donnell, the printout format is less important than the content, and he compares the difference in presentation to reading either a 200-page small-type or a 300-page large-type edition of the same novel. "They may look different but they have the same story," he says. While O'Donnell is dealing with the image-transmission difficulty by avoiding using pictures, the AAAS-OCLC joint venture will get better resolution of images through use of OCLC's high-resolution workstations that are part of the library center's computer network. "Initially, though, we may not be heavily dependent on pictures, but more on line drawings because it is still costly and time-consuming to send pictures," says a scientist at OCLC. AAAS will be choosing an editor for the new science journal sometime midyear, says Phil Schieber, spokesman for OCLC. Schieber says that the new publication will not be a clone of Science, nor will it be made up of rejected articles from Science. Speculation about its editorial content is that it will deal with clinical medicine. But both groups are cautious about speaking about their project until it is closer to "publication." The contract between OCLC and AAAS has not been finalized. Issues such as which organization is paying for what are still under negotiation, say sources. "They are also very careful about discussing the details of what they are up to because they are afraid they will wake up one morning and see that someone has done it first," says Ann Okerson, director of the office of scientific publishing of the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Research Libraries, a group that held a conference on electronic journals last October. Those attending the conference discussed the progress and pitfalls of the various online refereed journals. "The AAAS group is in an excellent position to start such a venture," says Karen Hunter, vice president at ier Science Publishing Co. Inc. in New York, a subsidiary of ier Science Publishers B.V. of Amsterdam, publishers of scientific books and journals. "Because of their reputation they can pull in the scientific leaders. Then others might follow." Like O'Donnell, editors for the other existing online academic journals that go directly into computer networks have also chosen to go without pictures. "A text-only electronic journal is still valid," says Joan Durand, associate editor of New Horizons in Adult Education, the first refereed electronic journal. Sent from Syracuse University, it began in 1987 and has published five issues for some 450 subscribers. O'Donnell, though, still expects to send charts and graphs over the wire--in equation form. The end user will be able to translate the formulas into illustrations. He says that his journal will be successful because his subscribers who are computer scientists already use a standard computer language with sophisticated machines, and are accustomed to working with equations. Facility with computers, however, is still not common in other scientific disciplines. "O'Donnell's approach may be okay for computer scientists, but other scientists, like biologists, are not as high-tech in the computers they use or uniform in the language that they use," says Dan Davison, a computational molecular biologist at the University of Texas, Houston. Last year, Davison tried to start an electronic journal for biologists who use computers, but couldn't because of incompatibility with end user systems. Davison also thought that without image transmission, publishing an electronic text-only journal in his field wouldn't work. Although text is relatively easy to transmit electronically, and graphics, like charts and graphs, can be dealt with through equations, most personal computers used by the average scientist still don't have enough memory to handle images. And since pictures are usually necessary for scientific publication, the difficulty--in terms of memory and software required--in sending them electronically is the major obstacle for developing an online scientific peer-reviewed journal, say scientists. "A biologist sometimes needs to see the faint bands on a Southern blot [a method used to analyze DNA] that that may not be visible after transmission," says Davison. But even if the image problem could be resolved, there is still some resistance among scientists about the accountability and prestige of electronic journals. "The scientists who make up today's editorial boards are usually older and may not be computer literate enough to be associated with such a journal," says Dave Kristofferson, manager of GENBANK, an online database of DNA sequences. "Without these older, established scientists on the board, the quality of a journal may be suspect." Davison adds, "No one wants the editorial board selection to be based on computer skills rather than standing in the scientific community." Although concessions could be made to editorial board members--for example, sending them printouts of documents--on-line editors say it would be easier and quicker if peer reviewers and board members use the technology. Richard Roberts, a molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., blames the slow start of online scientific journals on money considerations. He believes that refereed electronic scientific journals haven't yet been created because publishers haven't figured out a way to make money on them. "They are concerned that they cannot control the flow of a transmission after it reaches one source," he says. Photocopying an article and sending it to colleagues in the mail is a bit more burdensome than sending it over a network, he adds. "It would be like publishing only one book," says ier's Hunter. Publishers are also concerned about what do with their international market. "More than 60 percent of our market is abroad, and they aren't as computer literate as they need to be for such a journal," says Hunter. The other online peer-reviewed publications are Postmodern Culture, edited by John Unsworth at North Carolina State University; the EJ, or Electronic Journal of Communication, edited by Jim Winter at the University of Windsor, Ontario; PACS-L Review, edited by Charles Bailey at the University of Texas, Houston; and EJournal, edited by Ted Jennings at State University of New York, Albany. The only one that charges for subscriptions is the Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research, edited by Mahmood Kahn at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The charge is graduated--$30 for an institution, $20 for an individual, and $10 for students. Difficulties with the startup of the Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research, in February of last year, illustrate some of the problems of electronic publishing that face scientific online journal publishers as well. The journal is made up of a single, 15-page article without any graphics or pictures. The editors chose a single-article format because they didn't want to clog the electronic mailboxes of their 90 subscribers, which include 40 members of the academy and 50 libraries. "We learned from the experience of Postmodern Culture," says Kahn. "They had sent a journal containing many articles, which was impossible to receive." Other problems the editors had to work out involved copyright and citation concerns. "We decided to apply the same copyright to our journal as in any print one. We cite it like any other publications, but say it is electronic," says Kahn. Although scientists can access a lot of information on the networks through online bulletin boards, it often takes time to go through the electronic mail and see what's worth reading. Says O'Donnell, "At least with a peer-reviewed journal you can feel confident that others have given it enough attention, and you're not wasting your time. 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Publishers Work Toward Starting Reputable Online Science Journals

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