Editor's Choice | This Week in BMJ | Press releases
BMJ No 7123 Volume 315 Education and debate Saturday 20/27 December Christmas 1997 issue
Something for everyoneRichard Smith Electronic publishing will turn scientific "papers"
from dead documents into live ones. Vitek Tracz, founder of Biomednet
and one of the contributors above, has called scientific papers
"quasilegal documents." They are written not to be read but for
scientists to defend, justify, and support what they have done. They
may even deceive in that they suggest an order that almost certainly
wasn't there in the research itself. And once published they are
frozen. Many criticisms and suggestions may be offered, but these
appear months after the paper is published, and the paper itself cannot
be modified as a result. The best we can manage in paper publishing is
a correction and linked correspondence, perhaps with a response from
the authors of the paper.
Nobody can know with confidence what a "scientific paper"
will look like in five or 10 years' time, when electronic publishing
is the primary means of communication in all of science (not just
physics), but we can begin to guess. Electronic papers (an oxymoron)
will have many layers. They might comprise: a structured abstract; a
simple paragraph on what they are about; a "news story" written in
several styles and in several languages; something close to our current
papers, although probably at much greater length; underlying
instruments (like questionnaires) and data, together with the software
used by the authors to manipulate those data; links to papers mentioned
in the references, preferably in full text; full information on what
searches were done to find previous work; links to descriptions at
several levels of complexity of all standards methods used; full
access to all relevant work that has gone before; and much more that we
can only begin to imagine. The "much more" might include a video of
the scientists describing what they did, perhaps in interviews;
detailed information on the researchers and their institutions;
conversations with practitioners on what the results might mean for
clinical practice; debates on any ethical points; and comprehensive
information on any conflicts of interests.
Probably nobody will access all of this information, and one of the
great benefits for editors will be that we will finally have a means to
meet the competing demands of authors and readers. Authors often want
to give very full information, whereas many readers, particularly those
who are practitioners rather than researchers, want "the bottom line,
the message." Already we see paper and electronic publishing as
complementary: we will move increasingly to shorter, sweeter, more
readable papers in the paper journal and fuller papers on our website.
And the electronic papers will be alive. They will be accompanied
eventually by all the debate that went on as part of the peer review
process (often, in my experience, more interesting than the papers
themselves); correspondence in response to the papers will be posted
immediately on our website; and the papers will be modified in response
to the criticisms and suggestions and updated in the light of new and
important information from other work. Perhaps a world where nothing is
fixed will be hard to follow, but I think that the world represented by
symbols on paper or screens may then come much closer to the ever
changing world we all inhabit. I'm excited and optimistic.
BMJ,
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