Moving beyond journals: the future arrives with a crash
BMJ 1999; 318 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7199.1637 (Published 19 June 1999) Cite this as: BMJ 1999;318:1637All rapid responses
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I welcome the BMJ initiative to work with Stanford to make articles
available on the web, as I welcome the NIH initiative. Placing full text
articles on the web will open access to researchers who are less well
funded, make research more widely available and create potentially world
wide peer review which will quickly discourage poor quality work.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Just to clear up Leonard Finegold's misconceptions on the origins and
role of xxx.lanl.gov.
1)The archive started with THEORETICAL high energy physics, not
experimental. Theorists do not work in the large collaborations common in
high energy experiment, nor does their work typically undergo the sort of
in-house prepublication review common in high energy experimental
collaborations.
2)In fact, whereas hep-th was an instant success (with a large
readership, and a large proportion of papers in high energy theory sent to
xxx.lanl.gov), hep-ex was MUCH slower in getting off the ground.
3)It's pretty clear from http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-
bin/show_stats that porn-hunters do not constitute a significant
fraction of the "hit-count") for the LANL eprint archives.
hint 1) porn hunters probably don't make repeat
visits to xxx.lanl.gov.
hint 2) they probably don't spend much time there
on their first and only visit, so the
"hit-count" per porn-hunter is low.
At most, they constitute 1 or 2% of the total hits at
the site.
4)I don't think that the submission statistics to, say, cond-mat bear
out Finegold's assertion that "table-top" experimentalists only submit
their papers to the LANL archives after peer-review. nor do I understand
the implied assertion that, having undergone peer-review, a paper is
somehow thereby "correct".
5)Neither do I understand his assertion that "most people still do
their serious reading using paper, and will continue to do so." Of course
we do. I can recommend a good laserprinter if that'll help.
Jacques Distler
Competing interests: I've been using the Los Alamos Archives since
their inception.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Here in Morocco it's nearly impossible to get access to major journals because they're so very expensive. E-Biomed sounds like a great idea. I hope it happens. Maybe it will be a medicine GNU.
Younes Zouhair
179, rue Bilal Lagnanet,
26000
Morocco
Competing interests: No competing interests
One of the arguments for e publishing is the financial
constraints placed on most clinicians, these increasingly
effect the research community particularly within the NHS.
Much research is duplicated and we are beginning to be
encouraged to have grant submissions reviewed in order to
avoid this and make best use of limited resources.
Understandably people are unwilling to discuss projects for
fear of having their ideas "borrowed". Additionally some
good ideas are being lost because of the time and complexity
involved in setting projects up. Why not take the internet
one step further and set up a "Site of Ideas" where people
can register an idea, which if used by parties with more
time and resources, would be obliged to credit that idea
either as an authorship or the first reference. This should
provoke the use of such a site as a first stop for a search
and perhaps avoid the loss of flashes of inspiration by busy
clinicians bogged down by Clinical Governa
Competing interests: No competing interests
It is about time the publishing process be open to all scholars in
the academy and in private practice. Let the readership decide not these
hand selected (by the editors)so-called peers. Competition is good for
the market place of ideas. Why all the fuss as described in the Chronicle
of Higher Education (page A25, July 9, 19990 ? I plan to as the Academy of
Management which publishes three journals to follow the lead of the BMJ.
Keep the heat n the NIH. Odd that Varnus does not just do what is long
over view. Let the "elites" each cake.
Peace,George Munchus-UAB
Graduate School of Management
Birmingham,Alabama 35294
Competing interests: No competing interests
To the Editor
The rot has reached England. The otherwise superb think-piece by
Delamothe and Smith (19 June) is marred (non-fatally) by an introductory
quotation referring to on-line research reports as available "for free".
They
then use it in their fifth paragraph. I had thought "for free" was a
strictly American neobarbarism*. Those of us who love the Mother Tongue
(and I am not a prescriptivist) re surely appalled to find the Mother
Country's premier medical publication equally encumbering perfectly good
plain words ("free") by linguistically illogical excess baggage ("for").
Until about a decade ago that which is given gratis had always simply
been "free" (of charge); the parenthetic words could be expressed but most
of often were implied. "For "
is senseless. A preposition requires a substantive and makes no sense
yoked with an adjective (totally apart from being unnecessary). I hope
your eagle-eyed copy editors can discourage its use --- if you agree with
me, Of course, the "perpetrators" are BMJ editors.
Yours sincerely
David H Spodick MD, DSc
Professor of Medicine
University of Massachusetts Medical School
St Vincent Hospital
Worcester MA
USA 01604
1 Spodick DH: Pleonastic "for" ("For free"). Verbatim 1999; 24:34.
Competing interests: No competing interests
I have been watching the evolution towards e-medium. I am impressed with the rapid pace with which it is gaining over the convential pedia.
If the new technology is to be utilised - why limit to certain formats only. Does that mean that one may not be able to use graphics and other multimedia formats (linked to HTML file)?
If this is the case, we would miss the opportunity of introducing the richness which the new approach allows.
I would strongly recommend that there be no restriction except those of propriety.
Regards,
Hemant Shah
Competing interests: No competing interests
It seems to me that too much attention has been given to the
dissemination function of journals and its improvement through the
application of electronic publishing methods. I see little, actually
nothing, that refers to the other important functions performed by the
current scheme of journal publication. Preservation of the scholarly
record is one such function, and it is not addressed at all in the BMJ
proposal. Librarians are not forgetting it, though. And we must remind the
academic community not to forget it either. No amount of hand-waving or
references to "advanced technology" which will solve this problem
"somehow" alters the fact that there is no electronic equivalent to print
on acid-free paper. Electronic signatures decay, equipment becomes
obsolete and disappears,companies merge or dissolve and their promises of
access "in perpetuity" may vanish too.
Some serious discussion of this matter is necessary.
Concerns about the quality of materials posted to an e-site are
justified. Even now, with editing and review, authors are often lazy with
their references("Tokyo Meeting,1964"), spell creatively,write
impenetrably.Adherence to at least minimum standards of
syntax,spelling,use of the scholarly apparatus and some degree of
comprehensibility in the text is enforced by the threat of refusal to
publish unless the author complies. What would happen in the absence of
these controls?
In the BMJ scheme, and in the E-Biomed proposal as well, I missed any
discussion of how the contributions would be indexed, if they are to be,
and by whom. There is some talk about "powerful search engines". Well, if
that's all searchers have to rely on, they should prepare themselves for
some interesing,even hilarious, results.
The stakes are high.There are some things the received model of
journal publication does very well. Prudence and caution are needed, as
well as enthusiasm for the possibilities of the new publishing methods.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Editor - Thank you for contributing your editorial thoughts (BMJ 1999;318:1637
-1639)
to the ongoing discussions about the establishment of a bioscience and
medicine eprint server. You have chosen a viewpoint which defines a useful
perspective on a number of the issues central to the various proposals in
circulation and in preliminary practice. There are already several pilot
projects in this area. An extremely valuable bibliography devoted to these
issues has been compiled by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for
Systems, University Libraries (University of Houston, Houston, TX
77204-2091. E-mail: cbailey@uh.edu. Voice: (713) 743-9804. Fax: (713)
743-9811). You will find it available online at http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Many workers have been involved in this issue for some time now, and their
contributions are formidable. You will benefit from any time spent -even
briefly- reviewing this excellent resource.
Your editorial, while useful, contained significant errors. I shall
address three:
1. Stevan Harnad is not a leading thinker in this area. He is a
prolific
writer about the subject who offers no useful contributions beyond a
simple
imperative (Do it!), and a simplistic belief that serious concerns can be
dismissed (all is "easily remediable"). This view of his attitude is not
my
opinion, but an accurate representation of both our personal
correspondence
and his public writings. His equation of the physics pre-print archive at
Los Alamos (a qualitatively excellent but quantitatively small literature)
with the immense literature of biomedicine is blockheaded. He insists that
he is the only qualified arbiter of what is or is not possible and useful,
yet he understands nothing about the current applications of copyright law
in publishing, cares nothing about the meaning and significance of
archiving in its historical (i.e. future) usage, and offers nothing in the
way of concrete proposals for the achievement of these goals.
2. "Eprint" does not definitively mean "electronic pre-print." Many
of us
mean it as "electronic print," signifying "electronic edition or version."
This is not a quibble. It describes vastly different ideas about the
utility and value of the internet as a publishing and distribution medium.
Harold Varmus? proposal from NIH was not the first, not well-thought-out,
or even useful except insofar as it raised the public visibility of these
discussions significantly, and thereby further stimulated the range of and
participation in the dialogue. It also has served to divert attention from
existing initiatives and energy from ongoing work, neither useful
contributions.
3. There is no "long-term" solution on the internet. In the context
of the
present discussion, what is required is long-term commitment to the
maintenance of legacy materials, and the easy addition of and access to
new
materials. Also not useful are multiple server systems which would
fractionate the biomedical literature to sites which would require
separate
access. A number of technical obstacles remain, but computer scientists
are
approaching solutions to them (e.g. see Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles, and
Kurt Bollacker, Digital Libraries and Autonomous Citation Indexing, pp.
67-71, Computer, Vol. 32, No. 6, June 1999).
The views of Harnad notwithstanding, agreement on standards, formats,
access, and other issues present significant challenges. I and others
working in this area are committed to a course of development
which will ensure an eprint archive founded on the process which is the
basis for W3C standards: open discussion, broad-based participation,
principled and collegial relations, and a commitment to universal access.
That work will continue. Over time,the alternatives will be
sorted out and a consensus arrived at which is satisfactory -for the time.
I have no personal financial interest of any sort in this area. My
employer
may achieve financial savings in the future if all biomedical
journals were to be made universally available without cost.
Best regards,
Lance Sultzbaugh
Research Librarian
Elan Pharmaceuticals
Menlo Park, CA
USA
A selection of my affiliations appears below for identification
purposes. I
speak only for myself.
Member, Federation Internationale d?Information et de Documentation
Delegate-1999, International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions
Member, Library Association (UK)
Member, American Library Association
Member, American Society for Information Science
Member, Society of American Archivists
Member, Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
Member, Internet Technical Group (Sandia National Laboratory)
Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society
Member, American Communication Association
Member, American Medical Informatics Association
Member, Human Molecular Genetics Network (Netherlands ORI)
Member, Science and Technology Section, Association of College and
Research
Libraries (USA)
Member, Modern Language Association
Competing interests: No competing interests
Patient's view of electronic publishing
Thank you for your editorial stand on electronic publishing of
medical research and studies. For about a year, I've followed with great
interest the discussions on this subject in the newsgroup
bionet.journals.note
I appreciate the many efforts to make medical information more
readily available to physicians, researchers, and to the general public.
Such can only redound to the benefit of all save perhaps the hardcopy
publishers.
I'm one of what I believe is a growing number of patients who want to
actively be involved in the diagnosis and treatment of their disease.
Having with a rare incurable disease, I've been fortune in participating
in decisions on treatment options.
Thanks to the NIH PubMed data base, it was possible to obtain many
abstracts, and through cooperation of a kind medical librarian, numerous
full text articles.
(Fortunately my physician is one who did not view
those actions on my part as a threat).
In a posting to the above newsgroup some months ago, I made the point
that having both peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed research available on
the internet would pose a problem for non-medically trained persons who
generally cannot distinguish sound research results from results which
would be perhaps questionable.
My purpose in writing is to call attention to the
needs of patients and others of the general public
who will need the services of peer reviewers to
distinguish wheat from chaff in electronic records
which may include non-peer reviewed articles together
with peer reviewed articles.
(No competing interests)
Competing interests: No competing interests