Physicists thrive with
paperless publishing
BY DAWN LEVY
Publish or perish. That's the credo by which
scientists live. But in the world of high-energy physics
(HEP), where the acceptance rate of papers submitted to
journals is about 70 percent, that credo has gone the way
of the dodo bird and eight-track tapes.
At least as far as publishing is concerned, no one is
perishing. Instead of the old method of writing to a
researcher to get a reprint of his or her journal
article, HEP scientists are using the World Wide Web to
access e-prints preprint articles that let physicists
share results faster than they could through the journals
in which they ultimately publish.
"The physics community had a really rapid
adoption of this because in a sense it was just an
evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary
one," said Heath O'Connell, HEP database manager for
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). O'Connell
spoke about the impact of self-publishing on information
management during a Feb. 21 session on paperless
publishing at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington,
D.C.
Back in the 1960s, SLAC librarians started collecting
submitted preprints, and each week they would create a
list of all of them, which they would mail around the
world. Subscribers could then write to authors of the
papers that interested them and request reprints.
In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg set up an electronic
system at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
that would allow authors from around the world to send
papers on physics, mathematics, computer science and
other topics to a central repository. In most cases the
papers had not undergone peer review, but the archive had
checks to ensure that most submissions were of
professional quality. For example, the software checked
to see if the author was affiliated with a university or
other credible source. Scientists sent their preprints to
Los Alamos at the same time they sent them to the
journals.
Each day the Los Alamos archive system e-mailed
information about these papers to about 2,000
subscribers. A subscriber interested in a particular
paper could e-mail Los Alamos to have an electronic copy
of the paper sent via e-mail.
"SLAC had already been doing something similar,
but the great thing about the Los Alamos system was it
was all done electronically," O'Connell said.
"The beauty of the electronic part was it enabled
the entire paper to be sent as an electronic file."
The submission rate to print journals is just as high
as it ever was, but paperless publishing may be
increasing the overall quality of journal articles, as
scientists can incorporate peer feedback before articles
are set in immutable ink.
And e-prints are timely. Says O'Connell: "You've
done the work. You don't want to sit on it any longer.
You want it out. You want it communicated as quickly as
possible. And it could be six months to, in some extreme
cases, two years before it appears in a journal."
The part of the SLAC system on which the Los Alamos
electronic archive of journal papers was modeled was the
SPIRES-HEP database (for Stanford Public Information
Retrieval System High Energy Physics). Every day SLAC
downloads information from Los Alamos's HEP section into
its SPIRES database, and every week SPIRES sends
publication notes for e-prints to Los Alamos.
"The SPIRES database offers a lot of value-added
services, such as reference and citation linking, which
are very important because people want to see how many
times their work's being cited," O'Connell said.
"It's a measure of professional accomplishment.
Getting more citations is the research equivalent of
earning more money. You know how important your work is,
how many people have stood on your shoulders."
Users can reference e-prints just as they would print
articles. Ever since the inception of the Los Alamos
archives in 1991, each article has been assigned a number
that is a unique specifier. To submit a paper to the
journal Physical Review for consideration, the
author need only inform the journal of the Los Alamos
e-print number.
The SLAC database is to physicists what the National
Library of Medicine's Medline database is to doctors
only beefier. More than a virtual library, the database
contains more than 400,000 records of preprints, journal
articles, reports, conference papers and theses from 1974
to the present. It provides links to more than 475 HEP
experiments worldwide. It also gives links to the full
text of e-prints stored at Los Alamos, as well as print
articles stored on file servers of physics journal
publishers, such as the American Physical Society and
Elsevier, and physics laboratories worldwide, such as KEK
in Japan and DESY in Germany.
Duplicates of the archive exist on servers in Germany,
England and Japan. "The more places you have exact
copies of all your data, the less it matters if, say, a
machine blows up and it all gets lost, because you've got
somewhere else where it all gets stored," O'Connell
said.
So far physicists have been the biggest benefactors of
paperless publishing because they have a long history of
sending out their preprints as paper. SLAC's management
of the database saves scientists time. "Instead of
having to send out your paper to every reader in the
world, you could just send it to SLAC and then SLAC would
send a list of all the preprints it received,"
O'Connell explained. "Now Los Alamos National
Laboratory has made this effort of managing the papers
themselves even more rapid and efficient."
The physicists use a special typesetting program
called LaTeX (pronounced lah-teck) to convey equations
without the loss of formatting that can occur when files
are compressed and e-mailed. "This is a language
which allows you to just type in text characters and then
process the file, and it will come up on your computer
screen as appropriately rendered mathematics,"
O'Connell said. "Everyone knows how to use this, and
every department has its own LaTeX processor."
Although mathematicians have expressed interest in a
similar database to openly share information, other
scientific disciplines may not be ready for paperless
publishing.
"In some of the other fields it's been quite a
battle," O'Connell admitted. "It just hasn't
caught on. I think in large part you can really thank
LaTeX for giving us a good system to use that would
enable this to all be done so simply. Also, maybe the
extremely noncommercial nature of high-energy physics
contributes it's not like biology and medicine where
maybe your discoveries could earn you a lot of money and
you might indeed want to keep them hush-hush for some
period of time. In physics the openness is really what
it's all about."
While other communities worry about the so-called
"digital divide" between technology
"haves" and "have nots," the physics
community is using technology to make the discipline more
inclusive. "It's useful to countries that perhaps
aren't as rich as some of the others. Now all of a sudden
they have access the same access that anybody else
does to research done all over the world,"
O'Connell said. "So long as you have a computer,
which is getting to be not such an expenditure, you can
keep up with everyone else. I think it's really doing
something to bring this community together all over the
world. Even in the days of paper preprints this wasn't
always possible." SR
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