Electronic Expectations

Explore the future of Internet-based Science Journals!

Electronic Expectations: Science Journals on the Web chronicles the convergence of financial, technical, and public policy considerations that turned what seemed like science fiction twenty years ago into a library fact of life today. The book shows that while electronic publication greatly speeds issuance of important scientific results of enduring value, it also has the potential to lower the economic threshold at which crank papers and marginal publications can gain a wide, if sadly misled audience, in the short run.

In Electronic Expectations, editor Tony Stankus predicts with splendid irony that the electronic journals that will matter the most to genuine scientific progress will be the web versions of long-standing leaders among traditional print journals, whose electronic typesetting requirements gave the web its first format conventions and rules for safe content transmission.

Electronic Expectations will empower you to:

• assess the existing print journal system and its prospects for improvement through electronic publishing
• discern the competing motivations and strategies of science researchers, librarians, publishers and journal aggregators in going electronic
• identify the web winners and losers after these first ten years
• understand the underlying business and technological warfare affecting the larger future of the internet

  Electronic Expectations demonstrates that while scientists invented the web, they no longer control it, and that even the very largest research organizations, libraries, publishers, and journal aggregators, will, to a substantial degree, be at the technological and economic mercy of commercial users of the web.

Library Journal

Electronic journals are, of course, of great current interest to scientists and librarians alike and serve as a paradigm for the shifts that are occurring in publishing in general. Science librarian Stankus (Coll. of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA) considers their effect on libraries, aggregator services, publishers, and scientists, but unfortunately this is such a fast-moving field that much of what he writes is already badly out-of-date. He discusses identifiers, for example, without mentioning the Digital Object Identifier, which has been the identifier of choice among publishers for at least two years. He writes about how electronic publishing is affecting interlibrary loan (ILL) without ever mentioning Research Library Group's ARIEL workstations, which are transforming the ILL landscape dramatically. Is it really true, by the way, that libraries use subsidized shuttle buses between campuses as a way of hiding the fact that they are photocopying materials for ILL, as he implies? And how long has it been since CD-ROMs have served as a "stop-gap electronic archive"? Another problem is that, in spite of its title, 40 percent of the book is taken up by a questionable ranking of an out-of-date list of print science journals, and one major chapter is made up of an extensive, detailed history of Microsoft and its competitors. Both of these sections are out of place here. A great part of the author's labor apparently went into the construction of the lengthy, unannotated bibliographies that accompany each chapter. The majority of the works listed there, however, can be found in Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, published free on the web(info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html) and routinely updated. The author states in his first chapter that over 300 papers are "cited throughout the volume," yet not a single formal citation exists in his text. This makes it impossible to know the scholarly basis for any of his statements and conclusions, which often seem overbroad. Too often Stankus makes general comments about the attitudes of scientists and librarians concerning one another's behaviors or policies that are little more than speculation and guesswork. Of greater concern, however, is that the text is, as far as this reviewer can tell, completely unedited. There was scarcely a page that didn't have multiple errors in punctuation, syntax, style, or content. This is the fault of the publisher, not the author. Allowing a work to be released in this state--especially since the topic is of such vital concern to librarians--serves neither its author nor the information profession well. Not recommended.--Lloyd Davidson, Seeley G. Mudd Lib. for Science & Engineering, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Stankus, Tony, MLS (College of the Holy Cross)