Re: On-line Paleo. Pubs.

From
Date
Reply-To
I am on a committee of the Ecological Society of America, to decide
how the ESA should begin taking advantage of the Internet.  One of 
the major goals is to get into electronic publishing.  The managing
editor of Ecology and Ecological Monographs reports that most of the 
costs of publishing are absorbed in creating the first printed copy.
That is, in the administration of the journals, and the markup and
layout of each issue.  The ESA is hoping that, by publishing in some
form of electronic medium, the costs of printing and distribution 
can be reduced.  For now, this involves additional costs to convert
the printer's electronic page lay-ups into a usable form.

This appears to be true of Florida Entomologist, which has recently
announced an Internet version, available via gopher and anonymous
FTP on sally.fcla.ufl.edu.  A press release states that it costs an
extra US $5.00 per page to convert the journal to a useful format,
PDF (Adobe Acrobat standard).  They have yet to decide *who* will
ultimately pay this extra cost.  For now, you can get the journal
for free from the archive (assuming you've already paid the costs
of getting onto the Internet).  You will also need to locate a PDF
"viewer" suitable for the computer you use.  Look for help files
on the archive.  Again, the address is sally.fcla.ufl.edu.

One of the major advantages of PDF format (and others) is that the
article can be printed on a high-resolution printer with a quality
that is similar to the traditional printed journal.

I predict that the preparatory costs mentioned above will also be
reduced, by shifting more of the burden onto the author, who will
be expected to provide an electronic "manuscript" in a carefully
pre-defined format, one that will require minimal additional labor
beyond editorial review.  The lure for authors will be much shorter
lags in time to publication for those who are able to perform this
work themselves.  I say this because I see this happening already
in the physics community, where the well-established informal pre-
print used by many authors is now being turned to the advangtage
of the journals of the American Physical Society in this fashion.

	Una Smith			una.smith@yale.edu

Department of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT  06520-8104