Scientific Publishers Increasing Electronic Information Offerings

Developments in the electronic publishing of scientific material are proceeding apace, with publishers rushing to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the new media. Some publishers of journals and reference works that once were printed only on paper are hurrying to establish CD-ROM editions. Others are bypassing this step and heading straight to the World Wide Web (R. Finn, The Scientist, Oct. 16, 1995, page 16; F. Hoke, The Scientist, Sept. 19, 1994, page 17). However, no one in the scientific publishing industry is quite sure how researchers will use this newly accessible wealth of information. Nor do they agree on the format that electronic publications will take, the distribution mechanisms that will be used, how to price their offerings, and other economic issues. Despite the confusion, scientific publishers are making available a number of electronic products that are of immediate use to scientists. And all the signs are pointing to a near future in which the dissemination of scientific information will be more efficient. "It's going to make scientific information accessible to everyone all over the world in real time," raves Antonio Giordano, an associate professor of pathology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. In addition, Giordano believes that electronic publication will "lessen the gap between journals that have a high impact and journals with a lower impact," since most search engines don't discriminate between popular and obscure journals. Academic Press American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Annual Reviews Inc. BioMedNet BIOSIS CRC Press Inc. ier Science Inc. Inforonics Inc. Institute for Scientific Information Lightbinders Inc. PaperChase VCH Publishers Inc. Despite the rapid pace of change in electronic publishing, its evolution has been gradual, notes Peter Goldie, president of Lightbinders Inc. The San Francisco-based company publishes a number of CD-ROM and World Wide Web-based scientific journals and books. "When electronic publishing first appeared," recalls Goldie, "it was enough to get some simple text up, then you had simple text and a little searching, then full text, and then images." The means of accessing this information have evolved, as well. At first it was available only via user-unfriendly online systems, each with its own arcane set of commands. Then came the Web, with point-and-click interfaces that could hardly be any easier to use. Also appearing was the CD-ROM, capable of holding more than 600 megabytes of data, and accessible to the user as quickly and conveniently as a floppy disk. Because of the relatively slow speed of many Internet connections, extremely large documents-like most audio and video files-are still more suited to the CD-ROM format. Nevertheless, says Goldie, "The journal publishing we're doing is clearly moving to the Internet, and CD-ROM will essentially be an archive medium." Lightbinders' CD-ROMs are designed to work on Windows, Macintosh, and Unix systems. They have hyperlinks and hypertext, and real-time rendering and scaling of figures. The CD-ROMs also come complete with interactive programs so authors can display audio and video and embed 3-D molecular models in their research articles. "We've gone way beyond what began as a poor replication, and then a more realistic replication of a print product. Now it's far beyond the capabilities of what can be done on paper," Goldie notes. JOURNALS AND MORE: In addition to text, Neurocase, published by Lightbinders, includes video segments. One journal that takes advantage of this new technology is Neurocase, which Lightbinders publishes on CD-ROM for Oxford University Press. The journal centers on case studies in neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, and behavioral neurology. "In my opinion, many products have put technology in for the sake of technology, without really thinking of whether it's an appropriate use of technology," complains Goldie. The Neurocase CD-ROM includes video segments that show real patients with neurological disorders being guided by researchers through various tests. "It's something that really requires audio and moving video to properly perceive," notes Goldie. Even as an archive medium, the best CD-ROMs provide a great deal of value. One CD-ROM that Lightbinders produced for San Diego-based Academic Press is titled Methods in Enzymology on CD-ROM, CD-1: Recombinant DNA and Related Methodology. It includes 18 of the popular journal's 244 volumes, the ones specifically devoted to the development of recombinant DNA technology. "Ten thousand pages . . . basically defines the essential literature in this very important field," maintains Goldie. "You can pick up this one disk and hand it to a beginning graduate student, and he doesn't need to raise his head from the computer screen for many months." Reference materials seem particularly suited to CD-ROM. CRC Press Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla., is beginning to issue CD-ROM versions of some of its popular handbooks in what it calls the CRCCD Series. "This product will not only make these handbooks available on CDs in electronic form, they'll actually turn these things into live reference materials," says Thomas A. York, vice president of CRC's electronic information technology group. "If you see an equation you're interested in, rather than pulling out your old, trusty [Hewlett-Packard] calculator and punching keys for a half hour. . . you can double-click with your mouse on the equation, make it live, bring it into a 'math doc' window, and then manipulate it." CRC also offers another CD-ROM-based handbook called Properties of Organic Compounds on CD ROM. It not only allows users to search its 27,000 organic compounds not just by obvious fields, such as name or molecular formula, but also allows users to search by spectral peaks or even by a drawing of a substructure. Another useful reference is available from VCH Publishers Inc. of New York. The company has placed both the German/English and English/German versions of the parat Dictionary of Chemistry, a "ready" reference on a single CD-ROM ("Parat" is German for "ready.") A user can activate the dictionary from within any Windows application and access its 300,000 entries. If the user is working in one of many popular word-processing programs, he or she can quickly insert the proper translation of any of these terms directly into a document. Almost any life scientist would agree that the mother of all reference tools-the single most useful aspect of electronic publishing-is the ability to conduct keyword searches in comprehensive databases. Databases, with their massive amounts of information, are well suited to CD-ROM. The Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) offers several on CD-ROM. The Science Citation Index and Current Contents, with its regularly updated tables of contents and abstracts from approximately 7,000 journals and books, are also available online. BIOSIS's GenRef and Biological Abstracts-both searchable bibliographic databases that each cover more than 6,000 scientific journals as well as business and industry publications-are also available on CD-ROM. The Philadelphia-based company recently added 900,000 research records published from 1980 to 1984 to its Biological Abstracts on CD. DATABASES APLENTY: The PaperChase online service gives scientists access to several big biomedical databases. While CD-ROMs make it easy for anyone with the proper hardware to access a particular database, some online services are making it easier to access several collections. Howard L. Bleich, now an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical Scool, founded Boston-based PaperChase to allow scientists to conduct such research themselves. "When we started," Bleich recalls, "searching the biomedical literature was done by an intermediary. [The researcher would] describe the problem with a librarian who had been highly trained and who would then interact with the computer, often at a later date, and would then produce a printout that would hopefully address the question. What PaperChase did was to say, in effect, that the end user could walk up to a terminal and, without prior training, sign on and conduct that search." Not only has searching become easier, but also the results of the search have become more complete and more useful, notes Bleich. "Early in literature searching, one got almost no information other than the title of the article and the authors and where it was published. Then with time it became possible to see the abstracts. [Now the full text] is here today for a small number of journals for a small number of years. But with time it's clear that more and more journals for more and more years will be available electronically." The means of accessing bibliographic databases are changing as well. Long available only via direct modem connection, telnet, or on the CompuServe Information Service, PaperChase will soon be inaugurating a Web-based interface (http://www.paperchase.com). The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has placed a version of its popular Grateful Med program on the Web, as well (http://igm.nlm.nih.gov/[Link deleted because it is no longer valid]). And North Andover, Mass.-based Aries Systems Corp.'s Knowledge Finder series provides libraries with CD-ROMs covering all or part of NLM's Medline database. For information on book titles in science, Littleton, Mass.-based Inforonics Inc. offers TitleNet (http://www.titlenet.com), a database in which publishers list all the books in their current catalogs. To date, 40 publishers are included in the continually updated service, which is searchable by author, title, and keyword. ONLINE ACCESS: Full-text articles from the Journal of Biological Chemistry can be retrieved by CD-ROM software. Some publishers have moved beyond making bibliographic information available and are offering full-text articles online. The Bethesda, Md.-based American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, for example, makes its massive (35,000 pages per year) Journal of Biological Chemistry available at http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/. Anyone can perform bibliographic searches, but only paid subscribers can display full-text articles. CHAPTER BY CHAPTER: Annual Reviews Inc. is experimenting with publishing on the World Wide Web. Annual Reviews Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., is making two of its popular titles available on the Web (http://www.annurev.org/). "We've put the Annual Review of Sociology online, and we've begun taking orders," notes president and editor-in-chief Samuel Gubins. "We're offering the book on a chapter-by-chapter basis at a price of $5. In the fall we'll be launching the Annual Review of Medicine: Selected Topics in Clinical Medicine online. "We are using these two electronic publishing ventures as an experiment to determine what the impact is on the economic viability of the overall enterprise," Gubins continues. "The fear is that we'll be cannibalizing our own print sales." Many observers expect the next evolutionary step in electronic publishing to occur when there are easily accessible centralized repositories of scientific material. "Today there are so many journals that there is not even the opportunity logistically for the library to hold all of them," Thomas Jefferson's Giordano points out. "I think it would be cheaper and it would be quicker to have access to a centralized system that would gather all the information from all the journals and make them accessible to scientists-and also nonscientists." One of the first attempts to create a centralized system comes from BioMedNet (http://BioMedNet.com), a company headquartered in London. According to Robert N. Ubell, president of BioMedNet USA, based in New York, the site hosts 40 full-text journals. he anticipates that it will have 100 within the next three months, and 200 by the end of 1997. Access to these journals will be free to scientists whose institutions subscribe to the print versions. "If your library doesn't have a subscription to the print version . . . you have an opportunity to view and download the full text for a fee," explains Ubell. "The fee is set by the original publisher, and they run anywhere from $1 to $15 per document. My guess is that over time most publishers will be charging between $2 and $5." The BioMedNet site contains a great deal more than full-text journals. It aspires to be "the worldwide club for biomedical scientists," and it includes virtual meeting rooms for real-time discussions and collaborative work, notice boards for scientific societies and other groups, and a shopping mall. "A lot of the support for this is going to come from advertising," notes Ubell. "Ultimately we hope that even downloading costs will be sponsored by corporations." Folding & Design, one of the journals available on BioMedNet, was specifically designed to be an electronic journal with the print version almost an afterthought. One of its editors is Fred E. Cohen, a professor of pharmacology and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He and his co-editor-Alan Fersht of Cambridge University-"felt that there was a need for rapid dissemination of information and the possibility of a more interactive journal format. And so Folding & Design is published electronically first and then collected every two months and published in hard copy [by Current Biology Ltd., London]. Articles appear on the Net as soon as they're accepted or within a couple of days of when they're accepted." CD-ROM DELIVERY More than 900 journals are available from ier Science. Not all large-scale electronic publishing ventures are on the Web. Publishing giant ier Science Inc., based in Amsterdam, makes 900 of its 1,100 scholarly journals available to libraries through ier Electronic Subscriptions. The journals are delivered on CD-ROMs or data tapes, but the libraries are encouraged to load the data onto centralized servers. The pricing for this service varies, depending on the number of journals a library chooses to subscribe to and the number of users with access. "[ier's] electronic subscriptions very much parallel what publishers have done in the past with print subscriptions," notes Laurie E. Stackpole, chief librarian of the Naval Research Laboratory's Ruth H. Hooker Research Library in Washington, D.C. "Once you subscribe to the electronic subscription, then you have permanent rights to retain [the material you receive]. So if you were to cancel a journal, you would be allowed to continue providing your users with [previously received] information. That's not always true when you start to get into the electronic area with some publishers and vendors." NEW FROM ISI: ISI's Electronic Library will provide bitmapped images of science journals. Another ambitious experiment is being conducted by ISI. The ISI Electronic Library Project is an 18-month pilot program intended to make bitmapped images of the 1,350 journals indexed in Current Contents/Life Sciences available to library users. To date ISI has agreements from the publishers of 472 of these journals, and has set up pilot programs at six sites: the New York Public Library; Purdue University; Thomas Jefferson University; SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceutical R&D in King of Prussia, Pa.; University College, London; and Glaxo Research and Development Ltd. in Greenford, Middlesex, England. "We're trying to test market acceptance of a digital library that's delivered to the desktop, and at the same time looking at the security issues as they relate to copyright and as they relate to the authenticity of the delivered document," explains Jacqueline H. Trolley, ISI's director of corporate communications. For example, how can a scientist be assured that an article has not been tampered with between the time it was published in a paper version and the time the electronic version arrives on the terminal screen? And how can a publisher trace any illegal copying of its copyrighted material? Trolley also notes that publishers, libraries, and other information providers are wondering whether the economic model that's been used for this sort of endeavor is viable, or whether they will need to look at alternatives. "We're also looking at usage. How are people going to use this, and what are they going to do with it? Will they read an article on screen, or will they print it out? Are they looking at the abstract and then looking at the cited references, which we know from our research is what a lot of researchers do in the printed form? "We're testing rights management and security," Trolley continues. "What we're really testing is the degree of security vs. usability. We can make an absolutely tight, impenetrable security system, only nobody could use it. At the same time, it's important to guarantee the user that they have an authentic document. Everything is encrypted before it leaves our central server in Philadelphia. It is delivered over a dedicated line to a secure server at the pilot site, and then it's not unencrypted until certain signatures are matched at the workstation of the researchers. We've added in a number of other things-hidden watermarks, for instance, physical watermarks, and copyright statements." This is possible because the ISI Electronic Library Project is based on bitmapped images, which essentially are photographs of journal pages. The watermarks and copyright statements can be encoded on each individual page, making each page traceable, something that would not be possible if the materials were presented as electronic text. But a problem with bitmapped images is that the text contained in those images is not keyword searchable. ISI gets around this limitation by providing all bibliographic material, including abstracts, in a text format, so that it will be fully searchable. Whatever the outcome of ISI's experiment and other electronic publishing ventures, it's clear that scientific publishing has changed for good. "For journals that were historically based on paper, the transition will be harder and there will probably be a group of very well-established journals that will continue to be fairly tightly tied to paper copy," concludes Cohen. "And then there'll be new journals that have started without that history, which will presumably more rapidly adopt an electronic bias on both reviewing and publication, because it will be faster and perhaps cheaper. "And then the question gets to be, can the publishers learn how to make money on electronic publication? I guess the same question is being posed to a whole set of different businesses about [whether they] can make money on the Web. It's still an open question." Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., is online at finn@nasw.org.

Scientific Publishers Increasing Electronic Information Offerings

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