In the cost-plagued world of print journals, showy debuts are a rare thing. But on the World Wide Web, they have become so common as to be almost routine. Take Elsevier Science's effort to establish its presence in astronomy. When the Amsterdam-based publishing company's journal New Astronomy goes on line this spring, it will do so with a small but undeniable bang. In a video simulation accompanying one paper on binary pulsars, says Elsevier editor Michiel Kolman, "You will see how two stars rotate around each other: They evolve; one star sucks up matter from the other, explodes in a supernova explosion, and so on. It is a very beautiful way to illustrate a theoretical model." And to David Schramm of the University of Chicago, who will be one of New Astronomy's editors, the stellar fireworks are also an indication that Elsevier has recognized that the electronic journal "is clearly the way to go, the wave of the future."
It might be more accurately described as a tidal wave. As of the end of 1995, the Internet was already home to over 100 peer-reviewed science, technical, and medical journals. Some of them, like the On-Line Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Psycoloquy , exist only in electronic form. Others, like New Astronomy, are primarily electronic, with a paper edition published solely for archival purposes. Still others are the electronic versions of paper journals, such as Applied Physics Letters or the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), publishing hundreds of pages of articles on-line weekly. Most common are electronic adjuncts of paper journals such as Science, Nature, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and others, which offer tables of contents, abstracts, selected articles, and other features, but not yet the full text of all their published articles. By the end of 1996, the number of electronic peer-reviewed journals may increase by another order of magnitude, as publisher after publisher announces on-line offerings (see table below).
Electronic Journals: The Coming ExplosionThis list gives a sampling of the plans that major commercial publishers are laying for electronic journals. Elsevier Science. A program called Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions makes all 1100 Elsevier journals available electronically to subscribing institutions through their local servers. Elsevier also plans to offer a handful of new, fully electronic journals through the World Wide Web, including Gene-COMBIS and New As tronomy. Springer Verlag. Eight journals are available on the Web now, two as fully electronic journals, including the Journal of Molecular Modeling. Through an experimental program with AT&T Bell Laboratories and the University of California, San Francisco, Springer is delivering 24 of its 350 journals on-line to researchers at UCSF and plans to make its remaining journals avail able electronically within the next few years. John Wiley & Sons. Wiley's fully electronic Journal of Image Guided Surgery went on-line last April. It plans to develop Web sites for all 326 of the journals it publishes worldwide. Only a few will be available full-text to subscribers; most will offer tables of contents, abstracts, or other additional services. Blackwell Science Limited. Blackwell hopes to have 125 of the 200 journals it publishes worldwide available in full text on the Web by September through a system called Steamline. Academic Press. By the end of March, Academic hopes to make 174 of the 175 journals it publishes worldwide available on the Web in full text through a program called IDEAL, for International Digital Electronic Access Library. Taylor & Francis. This British publisher is experimenting with full-text, Web versions of 16 out of its 125 journals. |
But this electronic wave isn't just a change in medium; it is also a force that is transforming the nature of scientific communication. Publishers talk about using the interactive powers of the Internet to turn journals into perpetual electronic conferences, where articles take the place of lectures and sprout on-line discussion groups and commentary. The World Wide Web – the network of linked Internet sites that is the home of nearly all these publications – also opens the way to weaving electronic journals and scientific libraries into a single interconnected database. Already a mouse click can take a subscriber from one article to related articles in the same journal, other journals, and resources such as databases of DNA sequences, protein structures, or galaxy images. By offering authors' raw data or the software used in the analysis, some of the journals will even allow readers to double-check an author's work. All this may sound like hype, says David Lipman, head of the National Center for Biostatistics Information at the National Institutes of Health, but "in this case, this really is substance. It really is doable, and can be done very soon. It will really happen."
Still, there is a tentative aspect to this revolution. "Everyone is realizing there's some advantage to being hooked up electronically to the rest of the world," says Nobel laureate molecular biologist Rich Roberts, who is head of New England Biolabs and editor of Nucleic Acids Research, which officially went on-line on 1 January. "But most [journal publishers] don't really know what they want to do, or how it will all shake out." Publishers are torn between the fear of losing print subscribers and topflight research papers if they don't move fast enough into the electronic world – and the fear of losing revenues if they move too fast. Reliable mechanisms for controlling and charging for access to an electronic publication have not yet been established, says John Sack, director of Stanford University's HighWire Press, which publishes and develops on-line publications (including Science's on-line table of contents and other features). Moreover, the technology for putting full-text scientific articles on-line isn't simple, says Sack: "To do many articles and do it week after week after week, you need a real production process that doesn't require a lot of human intervention. And that takes a lot of solid programming."
Then there's the question of which of the Web's strengths a publisher should exploit. The most obvious is its capacity to publish vast amounts of material fast and cheaply, as the success of electronic preprint servers like the e-print archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory shows (see Electronic Preprints Point the Way to 'Author Empowerment', this issue). But while the electronic preprint servers are fast and free, they are low-budget operations with no peer review. In traditional, refereed journals, publishers are discovering, the potential speed of electronic publication is difficult to exploit.
But the Internet promises a lot more than speed. There are also the electronic bonuses that can be offered on-line – "imaginative ways," says Roberts, "that you can browse an article and get a lot more back that's simply not available on printed page." They can include:
But perhaps the most revolutionary change brought by the new medium is the capacity to publish supplemental resources that would be difficult or impossible to present in print. References at the end of each article in JBC, for example, are hot-linked to the National Library of Medicine's MedLine service. Click on a reference, and the system will pluck the abstract of the article from MedLine. And any genes in JBC articles are linked to GenBank, a service provided by the National Center for Biostatistics Information. Click on the gene, and you can go directly to the DNA sequence, if it exists. From GenBank, the NLM's own database structure allows users to jump in turn to other publications relevant to that sequence.
Individual articles will also start "sprouting databases"–additional information that could not fit in a print version but "will be fully refereed and dealt with the same as if it was printed," says Vitek Tracz, chair of the Current Science Group, a consortium of print and electronic publishing companies that publish the Current Opinion journals, among others. The American Institute of Physics's (AIP's) journal Applied Physics Letters, for instance, which has been on-line since the end of 1994, is providing an electronic version of a service called the Physics Auxiliary Publishing Service, or PAPS.
"What we've used it for in the past," says Tim Ingoldsby, director of new product development at the AIP, "is if an astronomer, for instance, has a massive data table related to an article he's writing, but it's entirely too large to reproduce in full, we allow that to be deposited in PAPS." Until recently the material would simply be mailed to a reader on request, Ingoldsby says, "but now we're establishing an electronic version of this, with a small fee for deposit but no fee for retrieval. In the on-line version, all that stuff will be hot-linked to the appropriate spot in the article."
Gene-COMBIS, the new Elsevier journal, goes even further. The journal, which is a section of the existing journal Gene, went on-line last August as a loose collaborative effort with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England; its name, COMBIS, stands for Computing for Molecular Biology Information Service. "So much of molecular biology so far has been concerned with data gathering," says Fletcher-Jones. "We're just beginning the phase of data analysis, which is where Gene-COMBIS comes in."
Like JBC, Gene-COMBIS offers hot links to other databases, including Elsevier's own Excerpta Medica database, known as EMBASE, which includes pharmacological and biomedical information and abstracts, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's databases of nucleotide and protein sequences. But Gene-COMBIS also provides a service that Fletcher-Jones calls a "first in scientific communication." The journal makes it possible, while reading an article describing a software solution to a problem in molecular biology, to download the program that was used to analyze the data, and even the data themselves, if the authors agree to put them on-line. "So really for the first time anywhere in science you have the immediately reproducible experiment," says Fletcher-Jones.
The Current Science Group plans to initiate a similar system of reader replication with its new journal, Folding and Design, a protein structure journal that should go on-line this month. It will be both paper and electronic, and papers in the on-line version will be hot-linked, for instance, to a database of the reagents used in the work. Traditionally, explains Tracz, "researchers are supposed to provide reagents for an experiment if anybody else wants to repeat it." Folding and Design will formalize that tradition on-line. "This database of reagents will be available through the journal, and you will be able to order them directly."
Indeed, data and techniques that once would have remained in researchers' lab notes may become a staple of some on-line journals–if authors are willing. Current Science journals will encourage authors to submit their data, says Tracz, but will not demand that they do so: "It would be up to the authors who wish to do it." If the publication of raw data does become common, however, journals will face some difficult questions about how to handle the material. If the data are to reside on the author's computer, hot-linked from the journal, some mechanism will be needed to ensure it remains uncompromised. "For the same reason you can't allow people to change an article after it's accepted, you can't allow them to have arbitrary control over this other material," says Andrew Cohen, a Boston University physicist who is helping to create a new electronic physics journal.
That's not the toughest conundrum in the world of electronic journals, though. A more formidable one is how to make readers pay. Virtually all of the peer-reviewed journals on-line at present are free–for now. JBC, for instance, won't begin charging for access until this spring. And Elsevier expects to waive subscription fees for Gene-COMBIS for its first year of operation.
Once they begin charging, many of the publishers are currently planning to sell subscriptions to their on-line journals through so-called site licenses, which will allow unlimited and unrestricted access for users who log in from subscribing institutions. To set a price for these site licenses, publishers are contemplating one of two formulas: either offer them free to print subscribers or, as Bob Kelley of the American Physical Society describes it, "charge a little more for both paper and electronic, and a little less if electronic" or paper only.
In the case of Applied Physics Letters, for instance, published by the AIP, institutional subscribers to the journal get the on-line version for a little more than 10% extra. "Because we're going to make mistakes," says Ingoldsby, "and because the print journal is still driving our business, we've priced it so you can get on-line at a very small incremental cost in addition to retaining your print." And for primarily electronic journals like New Astronomy, publishers are setting prices conservatively. The New Astronomy site license, for instance, will cost less than $400 per year, and will cover electronic access and a paper edition.
But site licenses may not be a lasting solution. As journals become increasingly interconnected, researchers will find themselves hot-linking from one cited or related article to the next, regardless of who the original publisher happens to have been. If all the browsing is done in a single publisher's database, it could be covered by a single subscription to the database. But if the hot-links connect articles or databases of different publishers, then it will result in what Rich Wiklund refers to as buying by the glass rather than the bottle. Says Wiklund, who is director of on-line services for the electronic publisher E-DOC (which also produces electronic features for Science): "Based on people's travels as they jump from item to item through the Net, they will be buying parts from every single publisher."
How this will work in reality remains to be seen. "There are lots of financial issues that have to be worked out and some technical issues–for instance, pay per view, credit cards on the Internet, etc.," says Lipman of the National Center for Biostatistics Information. "Frankly, I don't know the answer to those questions, but I'm 100% confident they'll be solved."
Science's latest electronic offering is a set of full-text Perspectives with links to relevant papers, databases, and simulations.