Lorrin R. Garson, Communicating Original Research in Chemistry and Related Sciences, Accounts of Chemical Research, ASAP Article, February 10, 2004. (Access restricted to subscribers.) Garson delivers a lengthy review of the history of publishing in chemistry, noting successful journals and indexing services such as Chemical Abstracts. He surveys the current journal publishing landscape, giving a passing mention of Elsevier and contrasting them with players in the open access landscape (PLoS, BioMed Central, others,) noting: "The viability of such endeavors is dependent upon attracting authors and efficient operations and, in some cases, upon publishers freely making their materials available. Ultimately success is dependent upon the financial support of journal purchasers-unless subsidies are provided from granting agencies or the government." The two major non-profit chemical society publishers (ACS and RSC) are referenced; however, the author documents that publications from these societies constitute only a small percentage of articles included in Chemical Abstracts, and that chemists contribute greatly to commercial journals. Garson remarks that electronic-only journals have not been successful (notably the RSC's PhysChemComm ceased in early 2004,) judging by slow growth in the number of articles published; in particular, the Internet Journal of Chemistry showed a surprising decline. Similarly, chemists have not rushed to place their papers in preprint archives, "possibly because of greater commercial activities in chemistry;" the Chemistry Preprint Server has attracted only about 700 articles over a three-year period. The author touches on publishing economics, pointing out that transition to electronic distribution has not reduced costs as may have been hoped, largely because of publishers' expenditures in information infrastructure while simultaneously distributing print journals. A brief mention is given to institutional repositories and similar efforts in academia to assert more control over producing and retaining information. On the question of journal prices, the author notes that many of the costs can be attributed to "the increase in research output" and "submission inflation." He goes on to name many of the innovations brought about by electronic journals, including embedded multimedia, computer code, spectra, web sites, while pointing the development of various forms of XML such as the chemical (CML) and mathematical (MML) markup languages. Garson concludes that due to the difficulties new publishers will face in getting name recogntion and recovering their costs, the name publishers will retain their lofty position in the marketplace.
Posted by
Garrett at 2/11/2004 10:54:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
