Subject: Re: Publishing Scholarly Work on the Web -- opinion anyone?
From: dking@amphissa.com (David N. King)
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 96 07:16:01 GMT
In article <51kk84$a0c@news.esrin.esa.it>, Nick Kew wrote:
>My original suggestion is to hold *abstracts* online, with the provision
>to hold full papers where appropriate. Keeping abstracts in an easily-
>searchable website would surely be a valuable service to researchers,
>while referring them to the traditional publishing media for full papers.
This is a terrific idea. It was first implemented three decades ago with the
MEDLINE system. There are currently several thousand bibliographic databases
that provide citations and abstracts "pointing" to the printed publications.
A few hundred are widely available through "vendors" like Dialog. Some of
them are already migrating to the web. MEDLINE is available on the web thru
several sites, the best public access being via the National Library of
Medicine's GratefulMed web-based system. Others are getting there.
>
>My software will index and cross-reference the abstracts,
There are already many systems that do this, but the fact is, 20+ years of
R&D; has not yet resulted in a machine indexing system that is satisfying.
Mechanically, you can do it pretty easily; in practical terms, it produces
marginal intellectual access to conceptual content. But maybe your
parsing, weighting, and automated Boolean algorithms are better than anyone
else has conceived yet, and I'd really like to see it, if it is. Have you
published it? If you have, I'm sure you are aware of the large research
literature on the problem of machine indexing of scholarly/technical
literature. If all you are planning to do is parse words from abstracts into
a database searchable with a typical web search engine query mechanism,
thanks but I'll pass.
Of course, that all assumes you have legal right to use the abstracts to
create a publicly accessible, searchable database and serve up the
abstracts. Have you discussed this idea with publishers and agreed upon an
acceptable framework for putting their copyrighted material up on your web
site? Or were you planning to simply download the abstracts from existing
databases, capitalizing on the work of those who create and maintain those
databases? Have you negotiated the legal aspects of that? Or were you
planning to write and keyboard your own abstracts? That's an option with
fewer legal hurdles, but it sounds like a lot of work.
>and has the option
>to hold any or all of the full papers online according to publisher choice.
Ah, now we are getting to the present. You are interested in creating a
digital library! Comparable to a traditional library, only in electronic
form. Tools for bibliographic control and access (electronic indexes with
abstracts) to a collection of literature in electronic form, all accessible
from one electronic "location." Great idea! There is a substantial
literature on this which I'm sure you are familiar with. ACM devoted a
special issue to it last year. There is an electronic journal on the subject
and of course there is a wealth of literature in traditional paper format.
You can find a bit on the web too. Digital libraries. Great idea!
There are some notable R&D; projects under way. National Science Foundation
has funded, I think, 9 major R&D; projects to the tune of $25 million at
major institutions: U of Michigan, Berkeley, Illinois, Stanford, etc. Those
projects are getting under way. But a couple of projects got an
earlier start. Perhaps the most impressive to date is the Red Sage project
at UCSF which is now in its 3rd year. A collaboration between the UCSF
Library & Center for Knowledge Management, AT&T; Bell Labs, and 20 publishers
of the biomedical literature. It is pretty small-scale: 70 medical and
biomedical research journals, including the major titles in clinical
medicine -- bitmapped images of every printed content page including
graphics, tables, photos, etc. The electronic journal collection is linked
to the MEDLINE database with a top-notch forms-based web search interface
called Medsage. Every UCSF doctor, nurse, researcher, student, etc, with a
network link or web access has access to the electronic library from their
office desktop. Pretty slick! Yes, it is fully operational. (Access is
restricted to UCSF of course. If you are interested, you can find out more
at http://www.library.ucsf.edu)
Make a wild guesstimate of the size of the database. 70 journals, maybe 1000
pages per year in each, abstracts and citations, one per article. 3 years in
the collection. That's, let's see, only 210,000 pages of articles. Not all
that small when you think about it, but manageable. But of course, there are
3500 journals in medicine alone. There are around 6 million records in the
MEDLINE database, most with abstracts. Consider the kind of system required
to manage and serve that up. How about if we just limit the system to the
top 500 journals? Maybe 50,000 articles per year. That's only 50,000
abstracts. Then throw in all the journal pages for those articles. Better
limit the collection to just the last couple of years, I guess. That's,
let's see, maybe around 1,000,000 pages of content, plus 100,000 abstracts
plus a database for searching. But to be a major digital library (a Harvard
or Illinois or Berkeley), expand that to include all of the quality journals
in all areas published; a minimum collection would be 50,000 titles out of
the 200,000+ published worldwide. And they can't limit it to the last year
or two; the have to meet the research and academic needs of their
university. I can't add that high.
Consider the mess of irrelevant junk you get trying to search using current
web-based search engines, and that the web at present has relatively little
meaningful content. Multiply that by millions of content-rich pages
annually. This is not something one just does overnight and serves up on
a little Indy. One needs equipment and technical staff to deal with the
technology (easy to come by if you can afford it) and needs people
knowledgeable about conceptual design and construction of complex
knowledge-based systems (harder to come by) and needs economic models and
evolutionary development strategies (virtually non-existant).
But the current, more serious obstacles are economic and legal. You might
want to consider those aspects in developing your system. Do you have any
publishers signed up yet to participate in your project? Have you figured
out how you will pay them for the right to provide access to their
copyrighted publications? And how to cover the costs you incur from them?
There are very thorny problems involved in this, and the publishers don't
really know what economic models to work with, what the "marketplace" of
electronic publishing looks like, or how to price their electronic product
yet. But you can bet for sure that they are not going to give away their
product or sit by and watch others distribute it without reimbursing them.
The long tradition of libraries providing free access to the literature
disguises the truth: information is not free, it is very expensive.
>
>As others have pointed out, the peer-review process is an important element
>of academic publishing. I believe web-based collaboration software can
>be used to facilitate this process, providing a forum ("workgroup") whose
>members are a paper's authors together with recognised referees in a
>subject area. Such papers may have readonly access to the general public
>(or subscribers-only if a publisher prefers) while in the review process,
>thus accelerating the publication cycle.
This idea has been floated by a few people. To date, there has not been a
mad rush by authors to abandon the established schorlarly publishing
channels. The realm of print publishing is too closely intertwined with
academic and professional recognition, grants and funding, careers and
livelihood. If you give a researcher the choice of publishing in a major
print journal like "Science" or an IEEE journal, or just tossing their paper
(their ideas and work -- their intellectual property) out there on the web
for others to "contribute to" using collaboration software, I don't think
you'd have a hard time guessing which he would choose. This is a nifty idea
conceptually and an attractive one technologically. It will be interesting
to see if it ever catches on. I'd say that chances are very slim in the
short run, but may be marginally better down the road in a very few
specialized areas like law and engineering.
>
>The technology is ready: we need only apply it!
I'd say current technology is not yet ready on the scale that is needed,
although it is getting there. I'd say the current crop of typical web search
engines and indexing systems are inadequate for current web content and
completely worthless for anything more substantive. But the web is a very
solid foundation for growth and improvement, and there will be real progress
made over the next 5 years.
I think it likely, in the short term, that we'll see print publications
migrating to the web via digital libraries -- first, university libraries
subscribing to electronic versions of print journals with access limited to
their campus (this is already happening per the Red Sage example), then,
professional societies providing access to the journals they publish to
their members free and to non-members for a fee (this is beginning now too;
IEEE journals are going up now for example), and a few publishers testing
marketing models for publishing on the web (Journal of Biological Chemistry
and a few others are doing that now). Then we'll see commercial sites run by
"vendors" of the literature with professional indexing/abstracting linked to
electronic collections (still a year or two away).
Of course, all of the above is just my personal opinion, and I'd be just as
glad to be wrong about any of my predictions. :-)
David N. King
Subject: REMOTE SENSING JOB
From: Andy Standley
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 13:19:45 GMT
New Bristol University Research
CENTRE FOR REMOTE SENSING
Introduction
Council has approved the establishment of a new University
Research Centre (Group 1) in Remote Sensing. Building on the
success of the Remote Sensing Unit (RSU), established in 1983
under the Directorship of Dr. E.C. Barrett, the new Centre
for Remote Sensing (CRS) will be promoted as "An
International Centre of Excellence for Satellite Remote
Sensing of Water in the Environment." Remote Sensing ("The
science of observation from a distance") has developed
strongly since it was first so named in 1960, particularly
because of the upsurge of interest and activity in Earth
observation from Space. Today, environmental Remote Sensing
is a particularly inter- and cross-disciplinary activity, not
only involving workers from many scientific disciplines, but
also engineers, politicians, economists, and others, indeed
many of those professionals who are concerned either with
improving the quality of life, and/or with understanding,
protecting and preserving our home planet. Satellite remote
sensing has probably already become the dominant means
whereby the Earth is mapped and monitored, a fact not least
true in respect of arguably its most important, ubiquitous,
yet variable mineral - water.
Water in the environment has been explored by the old RSU in
both breadth and considerable detail using visible, infrared
and microwave data, most of it from satellites. Working on a
range of Government, Research Council and European Commission
grants, plus research and quasi-commercial contracts from
many other sources in the UK, USA and elsewhere, the RSU has
won for the University of Bristol a truly international
reputation in respect of evaluating precipitation from Space.
Satellite rainfall algorithms developed by the RSU are in
regular use in several countries of the world, including the
USA, where NASA is generating global monthly rainfall
estimates using a scheme devised by the RSU as part of its
contribution to a major 8-year long NASA-funded project,
'WetNet'. But RSU has successfully developed
state-of-the-art methods for mapping and monitoring other
forms of environmental water also, including overland snow,
sea ice, atmospheric water vapour and cloud liquid water, and
methods for assessing key characteristics of water bodies,
e.g. the roughness of ocean and sea surfaces. The
metamorphosis from an inter-Departmental Unit solely within
the Department of Geography to a new University Research
Centre will open up broader opportunities for the development
of Remote Sensing on inter-departmental and inter-faculty
bases; indeed, a primary purpose of the new Centre for Remote
Sensing is to increase the University of Bristol's research
capabilities and competitiveness in this field, particularly
in respect of water and water-related themes. A new Senior
Lectureship in Remote Sensing has been advertised for its
host Department, Geography, to help ensure that the
catalysing effect of the change from RSU to CRS will be as
powerful and effective as possible.
Job Opportunity
CRS Post-Doctoral Research Assistant
An immediate vacancy exists for a PDRA to work for up to 9 months on the
preparation and meteorological interpretation of a passive microwave
Atlas of rainfall and sea state over the Eastern North Atlantic, and its
meteorological interpretation under Contract to the Department of the
Environment. Anyone interested (suit recent Ph.D. in Remote Sensing
related to Meteorology and/or Oceanography) should fax or e-mail a
Summary CV immediately to Dr. E.C. Barrett, Project Manager, Centre for
Remote Sensing, Department of Geography, University of Bristol, Bristol,
BS8 1SS (fax: 0117-9287878; e-mail:e.c.barrett@bris.ac.uk).
E.C. Barrett
23/9/96