electronica

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Dear Colleagues -- what a lot of fun all y'all have had musing on electronic 
publication while I've been away having a wonderful time as a guest of the U 
of Texas at Austin. Some more thoughts from someone in the business.
1) There is no such thing as a free lunch. To use another cliche, you get 
what you pay for. I wouldn't give much credit to a journal that was 'free'. 
To use yet a third cliche, I wouldn't join a club that admitted me as a 
member. And yet a fourth cliche -- TIME IS MONEY. The work Stefan Bengtson 
puts in to Lethaia and F&S is probably worth 100,000 dollars a year, at least.
2) Web publication may be fine for molecular and cell biology which 
re-invents itself every year or so, but palaeontology papers are meant to 
have a long shelf life. We still refer to stuff from the 17th century. Can 
we guarantee that web-published palaeo will be as durable, given that one 
needs a computer to translate unreadable (i.e. magnetically encoded) 
material that you'd otherwise read with your unaided eyes? 
3) How will people refer to web-published material in years to come, once we 
transcend the limitations of volumes and page numbers? It will be 
interesting to see how the new breed of electronic geology journals copes 
with this.
4) As someone said, the time it takes to publish a journal depends on the 
speed of review, not the medium of publication.
5) As I said earlier, print publishers are very keen on electronic 
publication, but are unsure how to proceed (hence Elsevier's guarded 
response to Mark Purnell's query). At Nature (my employer -- I'm a 
manuscript editor there, when I'm not on sabbatical here at UCLA), we still 
plan to publish on paper, but will probably extend our existing web-site 
with subscriber-only pages which will publish the journal 'proper'. This 
will help us solve our biggest problem, which is distribution. It takes a 
week or more for an issue of Nature to snailmail it to California, which is 
a week too long. 
6) QUALITY CONTROL. Electronics or not, it is VITAL that journal editors do 
not see the web as licence to print yards of verbiage which they would not 
otherwise do. There HAVE to be limits. Strict pagination goes with HIGH 
REJECTION RATES, which is essential for maintaining the high quality that 
ensures journal health. People complain when papers are rejected, but would 
prefer to send material to journals with higher rejection rates, as the 
material that is published has higher credibility. At Nature we reject more 
than nine in ten submissions. Much of what we reject is fine stuff, but we 
want to be in a position of having to choose the very best from a field of 
excellent work. Any other journal editor would say the same.
I think that's enough for now.
Henry Gee
Henry Gee
henrygee@ess.ucla.edu