Publishing on the net

Abstract

In a mythical golden age, a biological library could take subscriptions to all the journals of interest to its users. But with the literature expanding relentlessly, this is now impossible for any but the largest establishments. Now, only the most popular journals are taken, together with a few of special relevance to the institution's researchers. For access to papers in other journals, scientists can order a photocopy from a larger library or document delivery service, which is slow, or ask the author for a reprint, which is unreliable. Recently a new option has appeared: as journals put their full contents on-line, you can simply hook up to the net and download the article. Most biology journals now use the web in some way — for example by publishing tables of contents in advance of paper publication, or by offering supplementary material. (A fairly comprehensive listing of journal web-sites is available from the WWW Virtual Library: Biosciences.) A few journals go much further, however. The on-line version of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, produced by a collaboration between the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Stanford University, has been a pioneering effort. It offers the full text and figures of the whole journal, has an attractive and functional interface, and provides cross-links to Medline and other databases. The Journal of Molecular Biology, Nucleic Acids Research and Protein Science offer similar services. The publishers of these journals are boldly advocating the web site as an alternative to the paper version of their journals, rather than using the web site as a marketing tool to sell paper subscriptions. Publishers need an income to survive though, so most of the systems demand payment for access to the text of papers. Generally, electronic access is restricted to people with a subscription; most publishers allow non-subscribers to view only sample issues. An exception is the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which is currently free in its entirety although unlikely to remain so for long. Current Biology is likewise at the forefront of biological on-line publishing. Along with its sister journals published by Current Biology Ltd and many from other publishers, it is available on-line through BioMedNet, a web site which allows all its journals to be searched simultaneously. Readers can take out an electronic subscription to a journal or pay a flat fee for access to an individual article (for Current Biology, this fee is $ 1). The hope is that if viewing a paper on-line is faster, more convenient, and cheaper than obtaining a photocopy or a reprint, large numbers of readers will use the system. The two most popular formats for electronic journal articles are HTML and PDF. Of these, PDF produces the best printed output and deals better with multiple fonts and special characters, but HTML (the format understood by web-browsers like Netscape) offers greater scope for cross-linking and is more convenient for viewing on-screen. Recently, however, Adobe has blurred these boundaries by releasing the Acrobat Amber ‘plug-in’ for Netscape, which allows PDF files to be viewed within the browser window. Reading on-screen can be uncomfortable, but print-outs of PDF files are superior to most photocopies. The biggest obstacle to widespread acceptance of electronic journals is speed: why track down a paper in thirty seconds if it then takes two hours to download? This problem will not last forever, but while transatlantic links remain slow, electronic journals need to follow the lead of software archives and provide ‘mirror’ sites in the USA and Europe. Many benefits will emerge as more journals go on-line. Literature searches will be far more flexible and sensitive than those carried out on abstracts alone. And papers will appear more quickly: for example, Current Biology's new sister journal Folding & Design appears in print just six times a year but papers are published on-line shortly after acceptance, cutting the traditional time to publication by many weeks. The biggest change will occur when it is possible to follow up citations within a paper by clicking on a link which takes you to the electronic version of the cited paper. There are still formidable obstacles to be overcome to reach this goal, but it is an attractive prospect. E-mail: [email protected] Full-text versions of existing journals. BioMedNet (including Current Biology). Journal of Biological Chemistry PDF/HTML. Journal of Molecular Biology PDF. Journal of Molecular Modelling PDF/HTML. Nucleic Acids Research PDF/HTML. Protein Science HTML. Development PDF. Immunology Today HTML. Peer-reviewed biological journals published only in electronic form. The WWW Journal of Biology Experimental Biology On-line Other sites of interest. WWW Virtual Library Adobe Acrobat Amber