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Scientific journals for the Internet age

By Gregory C. Farrington and Helen Anderson

Progress in scientific research can be limited by the speed with which results are shared. Yet the two traditional methods of sharing results, the scholarly journal and the conference, both impose delays. Paper -based scientific journals take about a year to produce; conferences occur only a few times a year and can be expensive to attend. Publisher Elsevier Science and Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science wanted to test the capability of the Internet to provide a new form of scientific communicationone that combined aspects of the traditional journal and the live conference and took place around the world at Internet speed.

Early last summer, SEAS and Elsevier collaborated on an experimental hybrid: Their "Electronic Conference on Solid Electrolytes" was a journal that evolved much like a live conference. But the ECSE journal took only a few months to produce.

Interest in this experiment surpassed the organizers' most optimistic expectations. Forty-six papers were published in the electronic journal, and 185 scientists from 26 countries participated. The papers themselves, along with edited versions of the online discussions, will be archived in a special issue of Elsevier's Journal of Solid State Ionics, which will appear in paper, alas and of course, later this year.

Initial preparations for the ECSE Journal

The first stage of creating the journal began last May when scientists transferred their electronic manuscripts to Penn using FTP. Although manuscripts were originally submitted in a variety of formats, including Word, WordPerfect, PostScript, Latex, and Acrobat, the organizers decided to publish them on the World Wide Web in both PostScript and Adobe Acrobat formats.

SEAS staff did the appropriate format conversions and created a Web page for each manuscript. Each manuscript Web page included links to the PostScript and Acrobat versions of the manuscript, to any separately provided graphical elements or MPEG movies, and to a form-based comments page. The comments page enabled readers to exchange comments and questions about each paper with the author and with other readers.

The manuscripts were then organized into nine subject areas. The design of the subject area pages included colorful graphics from the scientists' manuscripts, along with the links to their Web pages.

The ECSE 95 home page included links to each of the nine subject areas and to four roundtable discussions. The roundtable discussions were provided to encourage discussion on topics of general interest, and each began with a provocative quote by the conference organizers.

Because the experiment was private, passwords and access instructions were sent to participants by e-mail.

The ECSE '95 Conference on the Web: (from left) Conference home page, a menu of papers on the physical properties of polymer electrolytes (with links to comments), and a paper using an MPEG animation to show movement in a crystal structure.

Online evolution of the ECSE Journal

The next stage of the experiment, the electronic conference, began on June 1 and continued throughout the month, with discussions proving to be the most exciting part. At traditional conference presentations, it is usual to have short question-and-answer sessions between audience and author. But with ECSE, the author could be in Spain and field questions from all over the world -- Canada, Sweden, Japan -- and the discussion could continue over a much longer period. Researchers who might have been constrained by budgetary or work site obligations were able to participate actively. Groups of scientists who might normally have sent one or two representatives to the conference were all able to participate. And, compared to a live conference, the ECSE experiment made it simple for even a relatively shy researcher to "speak up and be heard."

Some of the papers stimulated discussion that contin ued throughout the month; others none. Since the partici pants knew that comments would be published in print, many were reluctant at first to ask questions. By the second week of the conference, more questions and comments appeared, but participants may have been a bit more guarded than they would have been when speaking at a live conference.

The Internet format liberated authors from the con straints of the black-and-white printed page. Many papers included color graphics, which made it easier to present complex three-dimensional visualizations of atomic positions. One paper incorporated video clips showing atomic motion as simulated in a computer modeling experiment. Savvy contributors discovered that they could put Web links inside their comments, which they used to include pictures and updated graphs and charts.

Of course, live contact between participants, discus sions over lunch, beer in the afternoon, and long dinners in the evening are not possible on the Web -- not that partici pants didn't try. In response to a question from a professor in the U.K. about where the social activities were, an ingenious Swedish graduate student made a link to a beer- tasting Web site in Germany, complete with a beer mug icon from Missouri. But it still wasn't the same.

At the end of the conference, authors were given the opportunity to revise their manuscripts in light of readers' comments. A demonstration version of the ECSE journal is available at http://www.lrsm.upenn.edu/ecse/.

Virtually all participants said they were eager to participate in another electronic experiment and agreed that it provided a powerful new method of scientific discourse. It won't replace live conferences, but might it replace the traditional print journal?

The future of electronic publishing

Electronic publishing is now so easy that anyone, virtually anywhere, can publish technical work on the Web. If everyone can own a vanity press, what will happen to traditional journals?

Historically, paper journals have served several func tions. The review process needed to control the number of pages in each issue has also been a quality control mecha nism. The mere fact that a piece of work is published in a particular journal often indicates its level of perceived quality. Publication in print also achieves automatic archiving.

In an online journal, the functions of validating quality and archiving might be separated. For example, a researcher might submit a paper to the journal editor who would check to ensure that it met standards of appropriateness, language, and presentation. But then, instead of sending the paper out to experts for review, a process that can take three to six months, the editor might choose to make the paper available immediately, online. The author could then use comments from readers to modify the presentation. And the editor could use the comments to assess the paper's quality. The key decision regarding the fate of the paper for posterity would not be whether it was published, but whether it was later archived for permanent availability. Excellent contri butions could be stored permanently, secondary work sent to electronic oblivion. The key milestone for a tenure dossier would be acceptance into the archive, rather than publication alone.

But what about the archives themselves? Who would maintain them? As systems aged, would we be able to read old articles? Tapes, CDs, and magnetic disks all de-teriorate over time. Just as human language evolves, so do computer encoding methods -- but much faster. If old work is not converted into new formats and new media, it can be lost. Writing on paper is hardly a perfect method of archiv- ing, but the Internet Age has its own form of acid rot.

The ECSE experiment demonstrated beyond any doubt that electronic publishing has the potential to create a living, evolving journal, one that broadcasts new work worldwide almost immediately, and in a format that invites interna tional discussion open to all. Papers can be richly formatted using color, video, and sound, and the time from discovery to the exchange of the results of technical research can be reduced dramatically. To be practical, however, the prob lems of archiving and the validation of the quality of individual contributions must be solved. Fortunately, solutions can easily be imagined, so it seems likely that some form of the prototype ECSE journal will soon enrich the exchange.

Sidebar: Lessons learned

Two support issues that emerged during SEAS' publishing experiment were participants' lack of experience with Web software and problems with document formatting and conversion. Neither was a formidable obstacle, but both required considerable effort by SEAS staff.

Many researchers had never used the Internet for anything but electronic mail. Their first task was to install the client software needed to view the Web pages. Naturally, some participants had problems and they weren't sure why. From their perspective there was only one problem -- they couldn't view conference material. From the staff's perspec tive, diagnosing and fixing problems was challenging because a problem might lie anywhere in a matrix that included computing platform, network connectivity, layered networking software, Web client and server software, helper applica tions, and document format. Since last summer, however, Web use has become much more common and such difficulties are beginning to fade.

Document conversion required more time than expected. While HTML conversion required the most time and often resulted in a different "look and feel" from the original, HTML documents could be read easily and relatively quickly. Although the transfer time for a complete document wasn't necessarily faster than for PostScript or Acrobat files, the first part of a paper could be displayed before the entire file arrived, so the waiting time to begin viewing a file was reduced. Transfer times for PostScript and Acrobat files ranged from less than a minute to as long as 30 minutes, and although they were harder to support, they were easier to produce. These problems, too, are beginning to fade. Automated tools already make conversion into HTML much easier. A closer integration of Acrobat PDF format with the Netscape Web browser, expected early next year, will significantly decrease the disparity in transfer times between HTML and PDF. And the proliferation of the PDF format and free cross-platform Acrobat Reader software may displace the use of the PostScript format.

If SEAS were to repeat the experiment next summer, they would ask researchers to have their documents converted and stored locally. The online journal would then include hot links to wherever the papers were stored.