One point that came out strong and clear at both meetings is that preprints are not a universally prevalent phenomenon. Physicists and astronomers use them to the extent of creating formal databases and organized distribution systems, but other sciences do not. They are even less well known in the humanities and social sciences. In some fields, e.g. medicine, where results must be well proven/reviewed before used and where an economic interest is involved, preprint distribution is explicitly forbidden. At the preprint meeting, there was an informal consensus that once electronic journals are well established, preprint distribution will fade in importance. Unfortunately, that day seems to be several years away. Much discussion at both meetings centered around the added value that journals give to articles. The selection and reviewing process is familiar to you. In astronomy the latter is most important, but in other disciplines where the acceptance rate is not so high, selection plays a more important role. This is critical to the issue of preprints because the review and editing process often results in an article radically different from the one submitted. Copy-editing is very important, of course, especially for non-native English speakers/writers. Marketing and distribution are also valuable functions carried out by publishers. Ask anyone who has published his/her own book about that one! Electronic journals add even more by their provision of non-linear browsing (i.e. hypertext), instant and complete access to annotations and errata, speed of communication, and flexibility of presentation. Current drawbacks of electronic journals are their lack of certainty/stability, lack of a pricing model, ease of copyright violations, lack of peer review in some cases, lack of readers' access to hardware and networking (especially in developing countries but also in some small, underfunded, first world institutions), issues of archiving and integrity of the original article/data. In addition, the acceptance by deans, directors, and even authors, of electronic media is far from complete. Expectations of cost savings by going electronic are too high- "first copy" costs are higher relative to distribution costs, than many people think. This is especially true for serials with a large circulation. (Astronomy journals do have a smaller market base and therefore higher savings are possible.) Unfortunately, some of those first copy functions, such as copy-editing, will be sacrificed in order to realize significant cost savings. Others, such as marketing, will remain because just being on the 'net, doesn't give a journal a wide readership.

Ethics of publishing was a primary focus at one of the conferences. It was pointed out that ethical standards vary among disciplines and cultures. For example, although the interdict against publishing the same article in more than one journal is generally accepted, attitudes about special cases such as different languages etc. vary. Some of the main problems are fragmentation of research in order to generate more publications, multiplication of reporting results (i.e. various versions of essentially the same paper) for the same purpose, duplicate publication. Integrity of authorship is an increasing problem and some criteria for claiming authorship were outlined. I notice that one example of such a problem recently made it into Statistical Lore... in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business. There is cited the case of a 10 page study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that had 976 co-authors! In the 1950's the average number of authors per article was 1.8. By the 1980's that number had grown to 3. Apparently it is not uncommon for an article to list hundreds of authors. Other, more dramatic but less common, problems that editors have relate to ownership of data, data falsification, conflict of interest of authors, and theft of ideas prior to publication. Note that some of these ethical questions directly affect serials pricing.

Citation of articles was another topic of discussion- there are many drawbacks to relying on citations as a measure of quality of research. Bad papers are cited often- as an example of how not to do it! Leading edge research of high quality is often not readily accepted and citations may not appear until long after publication. Citation rates vary among disciplines. As much as 50% of research is never cited, and of that which is, much is not read by the citers. The implication, as with some of the ethical problems, is that too much is being published. Among other things, this contributes to soaring serials prices.

Technical problems associated with electronic publishing appear to be quickly diminishing. There was resignation to the fact that authors, for several reasons, will continue to use a variety of word processing packages to submit articles. Therefore the goal seemed to be to be able to convert all of these to SGML (standard generalized markup language). SGML is a metalanguage that labels parts of an article, such as title or abstract, and allows manipulation of those parts according to the publishers' needs. AASTEX was panned/praised. HTML (hypertext markup language) was mentioned as NOT being a suitable standard for typesetting. Search and retrieval expectations and standards were also discussed as being critical to acceptance and widespread use of electronic media.

Both at the preprint meeting and in a lively email discussion beforehand, there was debate about what a preprint is (a submitted article, an accepted one?), what publication is, how much control should be exercised over preprint distribution by the publisher, by the authors' institutions and by the database, who should maintain the databases, and how long preprints should remain accessible. There was general agreement that preprints should not live very long, reinforcing the concept that the journal article is the "real" version. A proposal emerged that each institution should be responsible for the mounting of their own preprints using whatever criteria they chose, that there should be a central site pointing to all these databases, and that authors from small institutions without their own databases should nevertheless have an opportunity to make their preprints available, perhaps via some central agency.

Finally, there was an optimistic notion that electronic publishers (not preprint databases) can recapture the function of communicating science and that their role as selectors and validators will continue to be critical in the age of information overload.

Canadian Astronomy Publications - 94/12/17 to 95/03/20

Up to Cassiopeia index.

Up to CASCA Home Page

Please e-mail any suggestions/comments to Jack Penfold (jpenfold@mtroyal.ab.ca)