Paleo21 - Publications

From
Date

In response to Jere's "Invitation for electronic...."

It happens that a couple of days ago I sent Stefan Bengtson a comment on
the white paper on Publications on the Paleo21 website, and I suppose it
will do no harm to copy it here for wider consideration and discussion.

.......................



Having been involved in innumerable discussions about electronic
publication in geology, I have come to believe that profitable discourse on
this topic requires allaying participants' concerns about two other aspects
of publication - convenience and archiving.  Unless those two aspects are
laid to rest at the beginning of a discussion, they cloud and muddle
people's thinking about electronic publishing per se.  Convenience and
archiving are of course both mentioned in your white paper, but I think
that the whole discussion of electronic publication will proceed more
effectively if they are separated out cleanly and dealt with convincingly.

Convenience.

Your paper rightly points out that "The ability to print material will
remain important as long as the average reader is more comfortable with
reading from paper than on-screen.  This will ... be until monitors are as
easy to read and carry around as sheets of paper."  

I don't have any special knowledge as to how soon that state of affairs can
be anticipated, but I think that we should recognize that it is not in the
foreseeable future.  

Thus people need to be firmly assured that electronic publications will be
paralleled by a version printable on paper.   This will require
acknowledging that some components of an electronic publication will not be
printable (animation, sound,...) - but this consideration is not of much
practical importance since they will rarely be used.

This paper publication will likely not be of the kind to which we are
accustomed - durably bound books in which only a few chapters are of
interest to the reader, and journals with a high proportion of articles of
no interest to any particular researcher.  It will be much more of an "on
demand" process.

I don't know it is in Europe, but the US is pretty well covered by copying
outlets under the name of "Kinko's", who can accept electronic files and
use Xerox DocuTech systems to produce well printed, bound paper copies of
books and articles for individual readers at a reasonable cost.  Such
facilities are sure to become widespread in the near future.  Until they
do, researchers in less well technologically endowed places can presumably
obtain printed items by mail from such a copying outlet.

Conclusion - People need not worry about losing access to materials printed
on paper.


Archiving.

This is very likely a subset of the printing-on-paper concern.

There are plans for some libraries to act as enduring repositories for
electronic publications, but not many geologists are confident that those
repositories will be able to maintain readability of large volumes of
electronic documents as the technologies for storage and display undergo
frequent change.

Provided that discussion participants can be convinced that archive-quality
paper copies of literature will be available for library storage, they will
not be distractingly worried over the issue of long-term accessibility - so
important for the scientific enterprise.



W. Riedel
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
UCSD
La Jolla, CA 92093-0220

wriedel@ucsd.edu
phone (619) 534-4386
fax   (619) 534-0784

. . . .  May the Force be with you . . . .