Sophie L. Wilkinson
C&EN Washington

Most chemistry journals--whether created in the last millennium or within the past few months--are firmly anchored in the print medium. But that is gradually changing.

Granted, many journal publishers put electronic analogs of their print editions online, with varying degrees of sophistication and associated added value. For instance, new articles might be posted on a journal's website just as soon as they've made it through the review and editing process, rather than being held until the next print issue is published and mailed to subscribers. And the online articles might include supplemental information that can't be duplicated in print. Molecular structures that rotate and movies that show an experiment in progress are just two examples.

For some publishers, however, these online efforts aren't enough. They want to free readers and authors completely from what they perceive as the limitations and conventions of print, so they are establishing journals that are available only in electronic form.

These visionaries have gotten somewhat ahead of their audience and potential contributors, however, with both groups needing some convincing that e-only journals are the way to go. Authors, after all, tend to stick with publishing the way they've always done it, according to Michael Hannant, publisher for electronic journals at the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Cambridge, England.

It turns out that normal publicity channels aren't sufficient to persuade authors to try out the sophisticated features of online journals, Hannant says. But when RSC representatives demonstrate the journals' capabilities to authors one-on-one, "they really can't believe what you can do," he says. Hannant notes that authors don't have to learn a raft of unfamiliar software programs to work with these journals; instead, they can generally submit data in formats they're already using in their research.

Beyond author inertia, another factor hampering the growth of wholly online publications is their relative youth and obscurity. "It's difficult to start any new publication," observes Robert D. Bovenschulte, publications division director for the American Chemical Society. "There has to be a compelling reason why authors will start to send their articles to a new journal." He believes that "the dearth of articles for online-only journals makes it clear that there is resistance."

Indeed, says Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development for the American Institute of Physics (AIP), Melville, N.Y., online-only journals "are regarded as somewhat inferior today."

Hannant links this taint to the fact that e-only journals initially "tended to be produced by researchers, by publishers that didn't have a pedigree." There was some concern that "they couldn't be trusted to maintain the information" in archives over the years and that it would be lost forever.

"Now, mainstream publishers are starting to experiment with new journals in electronic-only dissemination, and they bring the pedigree along with them," Hannant says. "I don't think anyone would believe that RSC would not archive its electronic-only journals." With reputable publishers getting on board, he adds, authors "are starting to want to submit articles to these types of journals."

Hannant (left) and Bolman

Even if the archiving issue is settled satisfactorily, authors may have reservations about whether these journals can provide enough exposure for their work. In principle, online distribution can be more extensive than print, Bovenschulte says, but that's only true if a sufficient number of readers visit a journal's website. "There is a distinction between giving access and getting attention," he explains. "You can publish the Journal of Left Earlobe Anatomy, and you can say it's free to the world, but if very few people come and look at it, or almost nobody knows about it, then it doesn't make any difference."

The low profile of new journals puts them in a catch-22 situation, says Pieter S. H. Bolman, president of Academic Press, San Diego: "not being able to attract a large audience because one does not have the best authors and not being able to attract the best authors because one cannot guarantee a large audience."

New journals also suffer from a lack of coverage in databases, including those of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which ranks publications according to impact factors and other measures of prestige. Such indicators are important in choosing where to submit a manuscript and in weighing a researcher's bibliography during tenure evaluations, Ingoldsby says. "When you're a professor and you're trying to get tenure, it's better to publish in the Journal of the American Chemical Society than somebody's fly-by-night start-up online chemistry journal," he says.

Hannant notes that "it's quite difficult to get an organization like ISI to cover an electronic-only journal until it gets to such a stage that it is competing head-to-head with something that's out there at the moment."

ISI says on its website that it would be economically unfeasible to include in its databases all journals that are published. Even if it were possible, the Philadelphia-based company adds, it would be unnecessary, because studies show that most of the scientifically significant papers are published in a small subset of journals.

ISI says it evaluates the selection of journals in its database every two weeks and adds new titles or drops old ones that have become less useful. In evaluating electronic journals, the firm looks for quality of content, caliber of the editorial board and authors, grant funding, peer review, an international flavor, and how regularly new articles are posted. Currently, the company's databases cover almost 1,900 chemistry-related journals but just a few e-only ones:Journal of Molecular Modeling, Molecular Vision, and Molecules. ISI expects its coverage to grow as more e-only journals become established.

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) abstracts and indexes chemically relevant articles from 42 online-only journals. Chemical Abstracts database editor David Weisgerber says CAS continually reviews new journals--both print and electronic--for possible addition to the list of journals it monitors. In order to be added to the list, Weisgerber notes, an e-only journal must present information in a form similar to that of a scientific paper; identify authorship; be publicly available (not necessarily free, but not restricted to a particular audience); maintain the content unaltered over time; and provide some relative permanence or continued accessibility through a citable electronic address.

E-journals covered by CAS include three from RSC. PhysChemComm, a journal about physical chemistry and chemical physics, posted its first article online in October 1998. PhysChemComm offers interactive features such as videos, animated three-dimensional structures, and spectra whose data can be downloaded into a reader's computer. In all, the journal carries "far too much information to publish in print," Hannant says, and so RSC believes it can only do justice to its contents in an online configuration.

Online manuscript handling has a significant impact on timeliness, according to Jamie S. Humphrey, PhysChemComm's managing editor. With submission, delivery to referees, production, and publication all carried out electronically, RSC found that the average time to publication for an article dropped from 100 days for a print publication to 40 days for the electronic analog, he says. The society has committed itself to publishing articles in its e-only journals within six weeks of receipt, and some have appeared in as few as 21 days, Humphrey says.

Most articles in RSC's second e-only journal, CrystEngComm, contain rotatable, interactive figures of, for example, packing diagrams and crystal structures, Humphrey says. Because it is online, the crystal engineering journal can present work in a manner similar to the way scientists view such information on their own PCs while doing research, he notes. "This is one of the reasons why I believe that CrystEngComm is doing well." RSC also publishes the e-only Geochemical Transactions as a joint endeavor with ACS's Division of Geochemistry.

E-only journals have been especially popular among physics publishers. Britain's Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society introduced the New Journal of Physics in December 1998. The journal makes the most of its digital processing and production advantages, asking referees to review papers within 10 days. The journal is free to readers but assesses author fees.

AIP is involved in two electronic-only journals: Physical Review Special Topics--Accelerators & Beams [published by the American Physical Society (APS)] and Acoustics Research Letters Online (published by the Acoustical Society of America).

Why are these two journals electronic-only? AIP's Ingoldsby says the community of authors targeted by the Physical Review journal previously "tended to publish only in conference proceedings, and there was a concern that that literature wasn't as well captured as it would be in a true archival journal. So the APS looked at the characteristics of the community, which wanted rapid publication, not necessarily formal. And they like things to be free." Financial support from the large, government-run, high-energy physics labs enables the publisher to offer the journal free to authors and readers, he adds.

The acoustics journal is electronic "to get the least amount of time between submission and publication. It has a completely electronic submission, review, and publication system," Ingoldsby says. "It's also a way of exploiting multimedia--sounds and movies with sounds--which for acoustics people is important. Sounds might be a very integral part of articles." The e-journal began its life as a section of the online/print hybrid Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, but this summer it budded off as a completely separate online-only publication, Ingoldsby says. Authors pay page charges, but the journal is free to readers.

Academic Press (AP), a scientific publishing division of Harcourt General, started up the fully electronic journal Atmospheric Science Letters in July. Editor Paul J. Hardaker has set a goal of 10 weeks on average for moving manuscripts from submission through to publication. By this time next year, he hopes to have an online tracking system in place so authors can log in to check on the progress of their manuscripts through the review and editing process.

AP has "several proposals on the table" for other new titles, Bolman says. But the company has "not seen a significant decline in the demand for print product, so we have not felt the need to publish many electronic-only journals. In fact, we have received specific requests from members of the scientific community to maintain the print products."

Like several other publishers, the company satisfies both camps with a blend of print and electronic publishing modalities. In its print journals, AP provides pointers to online ancillary material that can't be reproduced in print. And the articles themselves are available online as well, in some cases in advance of the journals' print publication dates.

ACS has no plans at this time to launch online-only journals, Bovenschulte says. "We are not opposed to them, but our customers--authors, readers, ACS members, and librarians--are concerned about the archival issue related to online-only journals. We do not believe the marketplace, therefore, is ready for online-only journals today. Indeed, several that have been launched in chemistry in the last few years are struggling to attract a significant number of papers."

Bovenschulte contrasts that performance with the "almost instant success we have had with Organic Letters and the other new journals that we have started recently." These new journals, along with the rest of ACS's journals, are published both online and in hard-copy format. The online articles can include supplementary content and may be posted on the journal's website several weeks before the print editions go into the mail.

"We believe having a print component is still obligatory today," Bovenschulte explains. "However, as soon as our authors and library customers indicate to us that they are ready to forgo print copies, then we will stop printing or launch new electronic-only journals."

If that were to happen in the near term, it probably wouldn't shift the frame of reference very far. After all, today's online-only journals aren't significantly different from their print predecessors. Sure, they have added features such as searchability, videos, and interactive files, but they are recognizably part of the same branch of the family tree.

It's likely, however, that scholarly scientific publishing will eventually shake off the traditions passed down from the print medium. What form might it take?

Ingoldsby suggests that "all aspects of the research process could be captured in an online journal." The research article itself "could evolve to include things that aren't there now, like the actual data acquisition runs that occurred."

Some experts in publishing think that the fundamental concept of an article may become outmoded. Rather than collecting everything into an indivisible unit, authors may slice and dice the content of a paper into stand-alone modules. That way, readers could pick out just the bits of the salad they want. However, "there's some concern that if we fragment the research article too much it loses a lot of its contextual meaning," Ingoldsby says.

RSC's Hannant speculates that there might eventually be an "area where all of the information on a particular subject could be collected and connected together so you wouldn't require things put together as articles. It would just be the main conclusions, the main findings that would be published in that area, connected to everything else in that area that has been going on."

One preliminary step toward that construct is to create "virtual journals," Hannant says. A reader can create a virtual journal by using a search mechanism to sieve out papers of interest from a large pool of articles. "So you're no longer required to buy a journal which covers quite a breadth of information. You could take things from individual journals and put those together as you wanted."

Elsevier Science has already come up with a couple of mechanisms to do this. One method permits subscribers to create their own collection of articles; the other makes the selections on subscribers' behalf.

The first option is available through BioMedNet, the company's website for biological medical researchers. Users can create a personalized virtual journal at the site by selecting subject areas and keywords--and can even give their journal a name. The site then fishes all the relevant papers out of a collection of more than 5,000 review articles from more than 100 journals. The resulting list of titles is presented as the virtual journal's table of contents. Readers can access the articles online by clicking on a title of interest.

Taking a somewhat different tack, Elsevier's monthly Combinatorial Chemistry--An Online Journal contains articles on combinatorial chemistry drawn from the Tetrahedron publications by the digital journal's editors. These papers are supplemented by commentary and specially commissioned topical reports. Patrick S. Jackson, Elsevier's publishing director for chemistry and chemical engineering, Amsterdam, says, "Authors in the Tetrahedron journals frequently request that their articles be included inCombiChem, and the usage statistics indicate that this is a highly valued service to the community."

In a similar vein, AIP and APS have launched the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science & Technology, published online weekly. It pulls together abstracts of articles that have been published--generally within the previous week--in participating source journals such as Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters. AIP and APS also publish the Virtual Journal of Biological Physics Research, which draws from print journals in the same way.

Through the abstracts collected in the virtual journals, readers have free access to articles from journals to which they have a subscription, and they have the option to pay a fee to view articles stemming from journals to which they don't subscribe. The science societies note that this mechanism allows individuals or institutions that may not be able to afford all the source journals to purchase only the specific sections of these publications that they need.

As science publishing continues to evolve, AP's Bolman imagines that "eventually readers will have access to one giant but distributed 'knowledge system' consisting of journal articles on which are built various layers of summary, synthesis, and consolidation of this primary information." This material, he says, has been "traditionally published in review books and journals, reference books, textbooks, encyclopedias, etcetera. Platforms of different publishers will be interlinked to make this possible."

Readers will be able to ferret out writings of interest with the help of search engines. But if these search engines are only capable of giving readers exactly what they ask for, this could interfere with the serendipitous connection of unrelated ideas that can result from flipping through a printed journal. Software developers are working to overcome this drawback by introducing browsing ability into the electronic realm. Hannant says some search engines already offer a two-tiered approach that skims off the most relevant articles but also proffers articles that are less obviously related to the search topics.

As such tools grow more sophisticated, and as authors and readers become more accustomed to the digital realm, online publishing of research results will become ever more common. For now, hybrid journals based in both the print and digital worlds appear to satisfy the majority of content providers and users. But the limitations of print can't be denied, and it appears inevitable that online publishing will eventually predominate.

Virtual chemistry publications collect papers from other journals

Note: All journals are peer reviewed. Table excludes those that have a narrow scope or that have few articles despite being available for more than a year. a Annual archival edition is available in print and/or on CD-ROM, in some cases for an additional fee. b Authors receive free electronic reprints. c Authors receive Web posting privileges.

[Previous Story] [Next Story]

Top

Chemical & Engineering News
Copyright © 2000 American Chemical Society