Online Access Is Profoundly Changing Scientific Publishing

See rebuttal to this article. Scientific publishing is undergoing a profound change. Large and small, commercial and nonprofit publishers are beginning to shift journal delivery from paper to electronic and from library shelves to users' desktops. Without question, the electronic age is speeding up information access. For example, from a computer desktop in his or her office, a subscriber to the online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) can browse the latest issue shortly af

Written byCarol Cruzan Morton

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Without question, the electronic age is speeding up information access. For example, from a computer desktop in his or her office, a subscriber to the online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) can browse the latest issue shortly after it comes out each Friday, rather than waiting days or weeks for mail delivery. For readers in the Far East and Australia, this could mean months. Online delivery also offers significant savings in postage.

'MURKY FUTURE': American Chemical Society’s Robert Bovenschulte acknowledges the difficulty of predicting trends. Researchers who are too busy to browse the phone-book-sized issues of JBC, one of the most prestigious journals in science, can do a key word search on the JBC Web site (http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/) for articles back to 1995. Within the text of an article, a protein might have a hypertext link that will take a reader to the ...

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