"Electronic Publishing Takes Journals into a New Realm," by Sophie L. Wilkinson, "Chemical & Engineering News, V.76, No. 20, p. 10-18, published by the American Chemical Society, May 18, 1998.
My father-in-law, a chemist, brought this article to my attention.
A retrospective article by a chemist, who wonders why a physics
e-print server has been so successful in distributing preprints and journal articles of reliable quality on the world wide web, and chemists have not. It made me wonder why the legal field and law librarians haven't started using the Internet to publish professional "papers."
I was struck by the parallel in problems experienced by scientific researchers with some of the issues we librarians discuss.
For example:
* Peer review
* Added value: Will the scholarly world shift to purely electronic journals? Issues: ease of reading, portability, demographics, speed, currency, review, editing, author-proofing-process, prepublication delays, hyperlinking, links to corrections and updates, access to more detailed data, links to reader comments, dual publishing, a "living article," and on and on.
'people will not be reading the paper copy anymore because there's not enough stuff in there. It will be missing so much of the enhanced content that electronic makes possible.'
*Archiving: issue: the responsibility for sustaining archives and access to the archives over the long haul.
*Change at what cost?: This article reports the same inflation that we rail about (from publishers like Reed Elsevier) in the scientific fields. Between 1986 & 1996 the average cost of individual serial subscription increased 147%
*Whose copy is this, anyway?: An insert on intellectual property problems
*Publisher value: resentment about journal prices can be traced to publishers' charging subscribers a lot of money for access to research papers and refereeing services that they receive for free.
This whole article left my head spinning about the potential and problems with electronic publishing--in the legal field.
Too bad the ACS hasn't put this article on the www.
Bob Hughes, Law Librarian
Spokane, WA
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