electronic vs. paper
C. Kagan
machine
readable) submission of author papers through the reviewing process and eventual
possible publication. I have in fact been doing this for many years, but had to
provide a printout also in many cases.
There are two issues raised in Jim Peterson Monash GIS lab, communication:
1. Paper preparation and processing
Reviewers need a convenient way of marking up the submission and returning
same marked up version to the author. This is very awkward to do in the context
of
a machine readable document, consequently the reviewer would frequently need to
print it out so that he can make annotations in the margin or between lines -
try
and do this on a screen! Furthermore much of the submissions unless they are
political speeches, include figurs, photographs, diagrams, and tables which are
formatted by a variety of typesetters and other software tools if electronically
produced. The reviewer would need these facilities to reproduce the paper for
review
purposes. Unless there are a very limited types of universally available tools
to do
this most of the submissions could not be properly examined and reviewed.
2. Publication
Once the review process is completed and the author has made all desirable
or mandatory changes suggested by the reviewers, his submission can in fact be
delivered to a publisher in machine readable form (acceptable, of course by the
publisher). Jim Peterson Monash suggestion of barcode intermixed with standard
text
for title, abstract &c. raises a number of problems:
1. Space taken up by the barcoded version of the text itself will in
most cases consume considerably more paper than conventional alphabetic
printing
considering the fact that each character is represented by at least 8 bars (if
8bit
coding - which is non error detecting or correcting is used). These 8 bars for
each
character would have to take less space by a significant amount than that
required
by each character of the alphabet. "Microbars" perhaps? Then a special reader
would
have to be made available to readers to read the microbars, or even plain bars.
What do you do with tables, figures, photos &c ? - give bitmaps in bar code?
If you accept the concept of microbars and special readers, you might just as
well
photoreduce the original text a la "microdot" and get a lot more space saveing
than
microbars. Then you again need to read, and obviously scan with OCR to get the
stuff into your system.
2. The more obvious solution at this time is the use of CDROM disks,
Typically 600 MB per disk, with a production price of around $1.50 per disk.
This requires the user to have on his computer system a CDROM drive, currently
in the $400 price range
and expected to be in the $50.00 price range within two years. This solution
gives
the ability of storing images, both static and dynamic, as well as sounds and
ultimately smells so that you can actually experience a volcanic eruption,
visually,
acoustically, and odoriferously in full 3D and color. Abstracts and Indexing
schemes
can be provided in periodically reissued CDROM disks or solid state equivalents
which
will unquestionably replace them within a few years.
David Mark
one in existence, PSYCHOLOQY. It has an editor. It has an ISS Number.
It has peer review. Manuscripts are submitted electronically, and
are sent out for review, and then either rejected or 'published'. Publication
is distribution by electronic media. Skeptics from academia may say that
this won't 'count' for promotion, tenure, etc. But in a c.v., this would
presumably look more like a journal, and thus more 'countable', than a
proceedings article. The issue of illustrations is a problem. Tables
can be typed to look right is ASCII constant-width characters. Apprently,
display PostScript is "on the way" and might soon allow PostScript diagrams
in email, etc.
Here is the PSYCHOLOQY call for papers from May 5:
Article: 178 of sci.psychology.digest
From: har...@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology.digest
Subject: PSYC Call for Book Reviews
Date: 4 May 92 19:35:36 GMT
Sender: VMNN...@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Listserv to Netnews Gateway)
Organization: Listserv to Netnews Gateway at pucc.Princeton.EDU
Lines: 46
PSYCOLOQUY CALL FOR PAPERS
PSYCOLOQUY is a refereed electronic journal (ISSN 1044-0143) sponsored
on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association
and currently estimated to reach a readership of 20,000. PSYCOLOQUY
publishes brief reports of ideas and findings on which the author
wishes to solicit rapid peer feedback, international and
interdisciplinary ("Scholarly Skywriting"), in all areas of psychology
and its related fields (biobehavioral, cognitive, neural, social, etc.)
All contributions are refereed by members of PSYCOLOQUY's Editorial Board.
Target articles should normally not exceed 500 lines in length,
commentaries and responses should not exceed 200 lines. All target
articles must have (1) a short abstract (<100 words), (2) an indexable
title, (3) 6-8 indexable keywords, and the (4) author's full name and
institutional address. The submission should be accompanied by (5) a
rationale for soliciting commentary (e.g., why would commentary be
useful and of interest to the field? what kind of commentary do you
expect to elicit?) and (6) a list of potential commentators (with their
email addresses). Commentaries must have indexable titles and the
commentator's full name and institutional address (abstract is optional).
PSYCOLOQUY also publishes reviews of books in any of the above fields;
these should normally be the same length as commentaries, but longer
reviews will be considered as well.
Authors of accepted manuscripts assign to PSYCOLOQUY the right to
distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it
permanently retrievable electronically. However, they retain the
copyright, and after it has appeared in PSYCOLOQUY authors may
republish their text any way they wish -- electronic or print -- as
long as they clearly acknowledge PSYCOLOQUY as its original locus of
publication. However, except in very special cases, agreed upon in
advance, contributions that have already been published or are being
considered for publication elsewhere are not eligible to be considered
for publication in PSYCOLOQUY.
PSYCOLOQUY CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWS
PSYCOLOQUY will now begin to publish reviews of books in psychology and its
related fields. Reviews should normally not exceed commentary length
(200 lines, see below), but longer reviews will be considered as well.
Please submit all material to ps...@pucc.bitnet or
ps...@pucc.princeton.edu
Article: 179 of sci.psychology.digest
From: har...@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology.digest
Subject: New format for PSYCOLOQUY
Date: 3 May 92 19:25:36 GMT
Sender: VMNN...@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Listserv to Netnews Gateway)
Organization: Listserv to Netnews Gateway at pucc.Princeton.EDU
Lines: 28
Approved: PSYC@PUCC
In keeping with our policy of adapting flexibly to the evolution of
this new medium, PSYCOLOQUY has adopted a new format. The nonarchival
newsletter section will continue to appear as a bundled digest with
many components, but the archival peer reviewed journal section will
now appear one contribution at a time, with a new indexing format. We
are abandoning volume and issue numbers. The "volume" number will
simply be the last 2 digits of the year (psycoloquy.92) and in lieu of
an issue NUMBER, we will use an issue KEYWORD
(psycoloquy.92.consciousness). This is to make the issue citation more
informative and transparent even when only the archival information is
scanned in an index of electronic files. In addition, there will be a
"thread" number, to indicate where in a series of contributions concerning
the same target article a particular contribution stands
(psycoloquy.92.consciousness.1). The last component of the descriptor
will be the author's name (psycoloquy.92.consciousness.1.bridgeman).
The recommended format for citation will now be:
Bridgeman, Bruce (1992) On the Evolution of Consciousness and Language.
PSYCOLOQUY consciousness.1
additional optional retrieval information:
[29 paragraphs, 20 references; file psycoloquy.92.consciousness.1.bridgeman
retrievable by anonymous ftp from host princeton.edu directory /pub/harnad]
Comments on this proposed format are welcome; we will continue to adapt
to the needs of the new medium as they become clearer.
Peter J Dotzauer
>What about the possibility of real electronic journals? There is at least
>one in existence, PSYCHOLOQY. It has an editor. It has an ISS Number.
>It has peer review. Manuscripts are submitted electronically, and
>are sent out for review, and then either rejected or 'published'. Publication
>is distribution by electronic media. Skeptics from academia may say that
>this won't 'count' for promotion, tenure, etc. But in a c.v., this would
>presumably look more like a journal, and thus more 'countable', than a
>proceedings article. The issue of illustrations is a problem. Tables
There are several more electronic journals, and the number is sure to grow:
- EJournal (ISSN# 1054-1055)
- Electronic Journal of Communication
- New Horizons in Adult Education
- The Online Journal of Distance Education and Communication
- Public Access Computer Systems Review (ISSN# 1048-6542)
- Quanta (ISSN# 1053-8496)
I surely would like to see journals such as the International Journal of
Geographic Information Systems addded to this list. The academic community
has better things to do than supporting established publishers with
skyrocketing subscription costs.
PostScript is a possible solution for including figures, but one would
still want to retain a plain-text version in parallel, e.g. for keyword
searches. PostScript is good only for display or print, and it's
difficult to extract the plain text from it.
--
Peter J. Dotzauer - pj...@osu.edu - pjd+@ohstmail - guug!pjd
Keith Clarke
american editor of IJGIS, I'd like to add my two cents
worth.
An international journal like IJGIS would have a LARGE
number of short term disadvantages to going electronic.
Among these are:
How to handle b/w photographs.
How to handle color photographs.
Ho to deal with an immense variety of
systems/standards from country to country.
How to deal with those users without access to computers.
How to deal with the review process.
In the long term interest, obviously twenty years
down the road I can see an all digital journal. For
now, I'm afraid that WYSIWYG. We just have to wait for
the technology to catch up for a while.
Neel Smith
possibilities? Right now, there are things that are more easily done
on paper, as many comments in this discussion have made clear, but there
are also many things that can only be done with an on-line version (such
as full retrieval of textual data). Since virtually all paper publications
today pass at some point through a computer system (if only to drive the
typesetter), why not use the source material to provide both electronic
and paper versions of journals? For some uses, paper may continue to
be more appropriate; for others, on-line information will be preferable.
Neel Smith
nsm...@polar.bowdoin.edu
C. A. R. Kagan
machine readable) submission of author papers through the reviewing process
and eventual possible publication. I have in fact been doing this for many
years, but had to provide a printout also in many cases.
There are two issues raised in Jim Peterson Monash GIS lab, communication:
1. Paper preparation and processing
Reviewers need a convenient way of marking up the submission and returning
same marked up version to the author. This is very awkward to do in the
context of a machine readable document, consequently the reviewer would
frequently need to print it out so that he can make annotations in the
margin or between lines - try and do this on a screen! Furthermore much of
the submissions unless they are political speeches, include figures,
photographs, diagrams, and tables which are formatted by a variety of
typesetters and other software tools if electronically produced. The
reviewer would need these facilities to reproduce the paper for review
purposes. Unless there are a very limited types of universally available
tools to do this most of the submissions could not be properly examined and
reviewed.
2. Publication
Once the review process is completed and the author has made all desirable
or mandatory changes suggested by the reviewers, his submission can in fact
be delivered to a publisher in machine readable form (acceptable, of course
by the publisher). Jim Peterson Monash suggestion of barcode intermixed
with standard text for title, abstract &c. raises a number of problems:
1. Space taken up by the barcoded version of the text itself will in most
cases consume considerably more paper than conventional alphabetic printing
considering the fact that each character is represented by at least 8 bars
(if 8bit coding is used - which is non error detecting or correcting).
These 8 bars for each character would have to take less space by a
significant amount than that required by each character of the alphabet.
"Microbars" perhaps? Then a special reader would have to be made available
to readers to read the microbars, or even plain bars. What do you do with
tables, figures, photos &c ? - give bitmaps in bar code?
If you accept the concept of microbars and special readers, you might just
as well photoreduce the original text a la "microdot" and get a lot more
space saving than microbars. Then you again need to read, and obviously
scan with OCR to get the stuff into your system.
2. The more obvious solution at this time is the use of CDROM disks,
Typically 600 MB per disk, with a production price of around $1.50 per
disk. This requires the user to have on his computer system a CDROM drive,
currently in the $400 price range and expected to be in the $50.00 price
range within two years. This solution gives the ability of storing images,
both static and dynamic, as well as sounds and ultimately smells so that
you can actually experience a volcanic eruption, visually, acoustically,
and odoriferously in full 3D and color. Abstracts and Indexing schemes can
be provided in periodically reissued CDROM disks or solid state equivalents
which will unquestionably replace them within a few years.
"... Thus the subscribers not only hear the news but see the occurrences.
When an incident is described that is already past, photographs of its main
features are transmitted with the narrative. And there is no confusion
withal. The reporters' items, just like the different stories and all other
component parts of the journal, are classified automatically according to
an ingenious system, and reach the hearer in due succession. Furthermore,
the hearers are free to listen only to what specially concerns them. They
may at pleasure give attention to one editor and refuse it to another.
... Furthermore each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument
he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a
mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they
can at a very trifling cost learn all that is in the paper of the day at
any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere."
>Jules Verne, "In the year 2889", New York Forum Magazine for October 1889.
Claude A. R. Kagan
BTL retired
phone (609) 466-1130
EMAIL ...![uunet]!att!sam76u!cark