Hello List Members,
Several of you reported that the following text arrived in garbled
fashion; hence the re-posting.
It appears that Stanford and HighWire are well along in deciding the
future of how many science journals will be accessed via the web. Whether
the blind community will have access to these journals, too, remains an
open question. Hence the following lengthy post from the Stanford
University News Service about the evolving production of science journals
to be accessed electronically. Enjoy!
--Bryan Bashin
Stanford News
11/20/96
CONTACT: David F. Salisbury, News Service (415) 725-1944;
e-mail: david.salisbury@stanford.edu
Michael Keller, Libraries (415) 723-5553
e-mail: makeller@sulmail.stanford.edu
John Sack, HighWire Press (415) 723-0192
e-mail: john.sack@forsythe.stanford.edu
NOTE: This article is available electronically on the News Service web
page www-leland.stanford.edu/dept/news/ and on the national
Eurekalert! web site www.eurekalert.org
_________________________________________________________________
HighWire Press a pioneer in moving scientific journals online
STANFORD -- Biology Professor Robert Simoni has set himself a test: He
wants to write a scientific review article without going to the
library to look up papers or references.
Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. But now it's just a
matter of time, due in large part to the efforts of HighWire Press, a
fledgling division of Stanford Libraries that is a key player in
shifting distribution of scientific ideas from printed journals to
online publications.
Highwire.GIF
According to advocates, online publication holds the potential to help
scientists better manage increasing volumes of scientific literature;
speed communications among scientists; reduce the cost of distributing
scientific information; and even improve the quality of science news
available to the general public.
"This is a transforming technology," declares Michael Keller, Stanford
University Librarian and publisher of HighWire Press.
Simoni, an editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), the
first journal produced online by HighWire Press, says that at first he
was skeptical. "I frankly took [Keller's] claims that we could
revolutionize how science is published and disseminated as hyperbole.
But now I'm really a convert. I think the revolution has started."
As to his test: "I just finished a review [for which] I only had to go
to the library once or twice. It is quite amazing."
The number of academic journals going online has been growing steadily
for five years. According to a study by Philip F. McEldowney at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1991 there were fewer
than 30 electronic journals, as measured by the Association of
Research Libraries' Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and
Academic Discussion Lists. By 1995 the number had grown to more than
300. Of these, about one-third deal with scientific topics, he
reports.
HighWire Press caught this wave in January 1995 when it began
producing the online version of JBC for the American Society for
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). Last month HighWire also
began producing a full text electronic version of the journal Science
for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of
the nation's oldest and largest scientific societies.
These projects have propelled the group into the vanguard of the
post-Gutenberg shift from ink on paper to electrons. As word has
gotten around to other scientific societies, additional proposals have
been flooding in. Already HighWire Press has signed contracts with
more than a dozen other journals, according to director John Sack, who
says he is particularly eager to talk to Stanford scientists who edit
journals and are interested in going online.
In a little more than two years, HighWire Press is nearly
self-supporting, Keller says. It employs 15 people (not all full time)
and brought in a gross income of about $800,000 in fiscal year 1996.
Next year he projects that its income will double.
Too much information to mail
Although HighWire Press had been a gleam in Keller's eye for nearly a
decade, its conception dates to 1993 when Simoni and his fellow
editors realized that their journal was getting too large. Although
they had switched to weekly publication, volumes had grown to the size
of phone books (800-plus pages) and were approaching the U.S. Post
Office's four-pound weight limit for second-class distribution. For
three years, the society had tried quarterly publication of the
journal on CD-ROM, but subscribers disliked the additional time delay.
"At a Faculty Senate meeting I asked some of our networking people if
they could put the CD-ROM version of the journal on a university
system so it could be distributed electronically," Simoni recalls.
After the meeting Keller approached him and proposed the alternative
idea of putting the journal on the World Wide Web.
Keller put together a team consisting of librarian Michael Newman,
Sandra Senti from Network Services and Ann Mueller from the Stanford
Data Center who developed a technical model and cost estimates. After
a year of discussion, the ASBMB board agreed to a joint venture with
Stanford Libraries. But the board insisted that the prototype be
finished in time for the society's annual meeting only three months
away.
To head the project Keller tapped Sack, then director of the Stanford
Data Center. Sack came up with the name HighWire, which he says was
appropriate because the group had taken on a very ambitious project
and was working without a net.
"We were trying to put the second-largest peer-reviewed publication in
the world online full text in three months when vastly larger
organizations had worked for 18 months and were still experimenting.
We knew we had to be successful, but there were no guarantees."
Despite such knotty problems as reproducing Greek letters,
mathematical symbols and equations, and the other non-standard
characters that are used in scientific literature, the group did in
fact produce the first online issue of the journal in time for the
society's annual meeting.
"These people have done what everyone at Stanford does," says Simoni.
"They looked at this as a giant, exciting experiment, which it really
is."
Simoni says his fellow biologists and biochemists have greeted JBC
Online with "a curious mix of enthusiasm for the technical
accomplishment and reluctance to abandon the print in favor of the
electronic."
The society provided the online version free to subscribers for the
first year. Recently it has adopted a fee schedule that requires
libraries to pay a significant amount extra to receive both the
electronic and print versions. The goal is to get them to begin
switching to the electronic version.
"The shift is going more slowly than we had hoped. I think everyone
recognizes that it is the future. But there is institutional
reluctance to make the switch," Simoni says.
This reluctance represents one of the major uncertainties facing
online publishers. It is not yet clear how they are going to recoup
the costs involved in going electronic. At present, most publishers
appear likely to limit access to full text and some value-added
services to paid subscribers while keeping their tables of contents,
abstracts and searchable archives available for free, Sack says.
Other questions that have been raised by some observers are whether
online products can maintain the same quality as their print
predecessors, and whether they can achieve the stability and longevity
of print journals.
Taking Science magazine on line
Nevertheless, scientific journals like Science are forging ahead.
"Once we realized that it was possible to deliver figures, graphics
and further data electronically, we felt we had to exploit the new
medium in a way that would serve our community better," says Science
editor Ellis Rubinstein.
The journal had already started a web page before hooking up with the
Stanford operation. But, when Rubinstein and his fellow editors heard
what HighWire Press was doing, they decided to join forces. "We were
very impressed with [HighWire's] plans for JBC," he says.
The Science editors were concerned that taking on a major new project,
with so many unknowns, might overextend their staff, resulting in a
decline in the quality of their work. HighWire Press helped reduce
this strain, Rubinstein says.
"HighWire is . . . not just a vendor. They are a collaborator. They
bring a sense of the market, based on their contact with the
scientists at Stanford, and their library background allows them to
bring interesting ideas to the table."
The leadership at Science has been surprised at how popular its site
has proven, even before the addition of full text of the journal
articles. According to their surveys, the site was averaging more than
25,000 unique visitors per week. About two-thirds of those do not
subscribe or read the magazine regularly, they have found. Activity at
the site has grown by 40 percent since the full text of articles was
added, Sack says.
"In the past, we pushed information out to our readership," Rubinstein
says. "With this new technology, we need to rethink what we do. We
need to become more of an information interchange."
Sack calls this a shift from a publication to a communications model.
"Maybe these journal articles that scientists publish are an artifact
of the scientific communication process. Maybe if we evaluate what the
scientists are really trying to communicate, there are better ways to
do so, given the more interactive, non-broadcast kind of technology
that is now available," he says.
Simply reducing the barriers of geography and time, and the vagaries
of national and institutional postal services, are very important to
scientists in many parts of the world, Rubinstein points out. On a
recent trip to Asia, for example, he found that the scientists there
were "very emotional and excited" about the magazine's online efforts,
which allow them to read Science articles when they are published,
rather than weeks later when the magazine arrives.
Simoni emphasizes that electronic journals will help him and his
colleagues cope with the tremendous information explosion that has
been taking place in the scientific literature.
"I have to read or at least peruse four or five journals [including
the 800-page per week JBC] regularly," Simoni says. "A great advantage
of the electronic version is that it allows you to search for specific
topics and even to preprogram your computer to download copies of
articles on specific topics. So it is not just another form of
dissemination."
Another potential benefit for scientists is getting their findings
into print faster. Going online at JBC beats mail delivery by two
weeks, Simoni says. Moving from paper to electronic communications for
the peer review portion of the process will skim another two weeks off
the process, he estimates. "So we should be able to get the
information out a month sooner. Some people find this enormously
important," Simoni says.
Rubinstein agrees that going electronic will have a major impact on
how scientists do their work, but adds that it also will have an
important effect on how the public gets its information about science
in the future.
"This technology makes it easier to adapt scientific material for lay
audiences," he says. Publications like Science will be able to provide
the public with news about scientific developments directly, rather
than relying solely on the media.
Reduced distribution costs
If HighWire Press is successful, it also may help substantially reduce
the costs of distributing scientific information.
"For some time I have been concerned about the treatment of scientific
information as a commodity," Keller says. "Commercial publishers like
Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley and Academic Press are getting rich by
getting information from scientists for free and selling it back to
their university libraries for large and annually skyrocketing fees.
This technology allows us to provide an economically viable
alternative, and we have a certain evangelic fervor about it."
A 1994 study by the Association of Research Libraries showed that
average journal subscription costs had more than doubled since 1986.
And a recent article in Forbes magazine reported that the
Amsterdam-based Reed Elsevier earned a pre-tax profit of nearly 40
percent on its scientific journals.
Commercial publishers are spending millions of dollars to bring their
journals online. The companies can afford to do so because they are
making profits of 25 to 30 percent per year and have very large cash
reserves, Keller says. All 1,100 of Elsevier's journals, for example,
are now available electronically.
"Scientific societies, even societies as large as the AAAS, don't have
millions of dollars to invest in electronic publishing," Sack says.
"Somehow we've come up with an approach that keeps the not-for-profit
societies from being disadvantaged in adopting new technology relative
to the for-profits. By working with us, they have in a sense formed a
collective to co-invest in the development of electronic technologies
that they can use."
HighWire Press intends to broaden this base even further by developing
and selling software that will allow non-profits to produce electronic
versions of their journals by themselves.
While this will not eliminate the problem represented by the largest
for-profit science publishers, Keller and Sack maintain that it will
help keep them in check by providing lower-cost, alternative
distribution methods for scientific information.
Despite all the activity, Simoni cautions that the final results are
far from clear. "It would be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that
this remains an experiment," he says.
-David Salisbury-
961120highwire.html
_________________________________________________________________
[HOME] [HELP] [CURRENT RELEASES] [SEARCH] [GUESTBOOK]
_________________________________________________________________
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 02 2002 - 01:40:36 PST