Electronic Publishing Initiatives of the AMS

Transcription

1 Electronic Publishing Initiatives of the AMS Keith L. Seitter American Meteorological Society, Boston, Massachusetts 1. Introduction The American Meteorological Society (AMS) currently has several initiatives under way in areas that can be defined as electronic publishing. This article intends to provide a fairly complete overview on these activities. I hope that as members read what is presented here they will realize that the AMS has been moving substantially forward on a variety of fronts quite quickly. It is important to realize that modern publishing is an inherently electronic enterprise even for the traditional print journals. Typesetting is merely the creation of electronic files containing the character and formatting instructions for the text portion of the manuscript, figures are digitized by scanning the author-supplied hard copy (or author-supplied electronic files are utilized), and the journal pages are composed with all text and figures laid out on the page in electronic form and stored as PostScript files. Other than laser-printed page proofs used for review by the authors and AMS editorial staff, the journals are in electronic form right up to the production of multipage "flats" used to create the plates for printing presses. We use the term "electronic publishing" here in a broad sense for aspects of the process that intersect directly with either the authors or users, covering both the submission and dissemination of published materials in electronic form. This article will first describe the use of electronic files from authors to support some components of the AMS print journals. It will then move on to recent initiatives that are examples of electronic publishing on the dissemination side both the distribution of print Corresponding author address: Dr. Keith L. Seitter, American Meteorological Society, 45 Beacon St., Boston, MA In final form 6 August American Meteorological Society Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society materials in electronic form and the distribution of research results and data that do not lend themselves to the printed page. It will also discuss briefly activities by the Society to utilize the World Wide Web (the web) to disseminate information in a timely and productive way. A central element of the Society's electronic publishing initiatives is the new electronic journal Earth Interactions. This is described very briefly below and in much more detail by Seitter and Holoviak (1996). It is important to emphasize up front that the AMS is using this funded project as a vehicle to gain capabilities in a wide array of electronic publishing techniques. We tend to talk in terms of the electronic journal (e-journal) as a stand-alone item because the conscious decision was made to start a new journal for this project that was independent from the AMS print journals, but everything learned from the ejournal translates to greater use of electronic techniques on all AMS publications in the future. 2. Use o f author-supplied electronic files f o r A M S journals a. Electronic submission of manuscripts The AMS has accepted manuscripts from authors on diskette for years, and TeX macros for authorgenerated submission were created and made available to AMS authors earlier than similar macro sets were produced by most other societies. These early attempts at taking advantage of electronic files to save the authors' keystrokes have had marginal success. A few diskettes using the AMS TeX macros are received each year, and a few diskettes are received each month that have the manuscript in a file produced by one of the standard word processing packages such as WordPerfect. These diskettes are used when it is cost effective to do so, but there has not been a major effort to get them from authors. 2025

2 While everyone feels this should save significant time and money in the typesetting process, the fact is that the keyboarding of the manuscript is an almost trivial portion of the cost of publication (less than $ 10 per page). Use of an author-supplied diskette also only cuts about two days off the production cycle at our typesetters, so there is not much savings in time. It was decided to not reduce the page charges to authors when they submit a diskette with their manuscript because our costs were not lowered by much, so there has been little incentive to authors to send in diskettes. AMS TeX submissions are low because few of our author base are regular TeX users (a recent survey of the members indicated that only 2% of the membership who regularly use computers use TeX as their primary word processing software and only 4% use LaTeX). Further, those that are using TeX or LaTeX have often opted to use macro sets they wrote themselves. Thus, even after several years of having the AMS TeX macro set available, we rarely see submissions that use them. If a manuscript has a great deal of math in it, an author-supplied diskette can only be cost effective for the typesetting if it makes use of the AMS TeX macros. For manuscripts with less extensive math, TeX, LaTeX, and standard word processor files can often be used to reduce the cost of typesetting by a few dollars a page, and author-supplied diskettes are used whenever possible in those situations. Using the author's keystrokes can be helpful in some situations, and the AMS will continue to take advantage of them when possible, but this will not impact the publishing process in any significant way for the AMS journals in the near future. b. Electronic submission of figures While having authors supply diskettes with their manuscript does not generally lead to a higher quality product or save much money, having authors submit their figures electronically has the potential to noticeably improve the quality of printed figures and may eventually show up as reduced costs to the AMS as publisher. Guidelines have been published (see Bulletin, August 1994, or the AMS web site at AMS) on how authors can submit figures they have created electronically (which represents a large fraction of all figures these days) to the AMS in electronic form so that these files can be used directly in the printing process. Use of the author's files skips the step of scanning the hard copy produced by the author to generate an electronic version of the figure and 2030 thus allows a higher quality, first-generation print of the figure. Authors are increasingly taking advantage of this opportunity both through the submission of diskettes containing the figures and through FTP submission of the figure files. So far, these files have been used with pretty good success. As with electronic submission of manuscripts, we are not seeing much savings with this procedure (in fact, so far we are seeing no savings at all), so no financial incentives have been offered to authors. Authors appear to be recognizing the potential for notably better reproduction of their figures, however, and it is hoped that this will be sufficient incentive. As this form of submission of figures becomes more common, it may lead to lower production costs than the traditional hard copy figures. The AMS may not reach a position where it can lower the author charges as a result of electronic submission, but industry experts believe that increased use of author-supplied electronic figures will help keep costs from rising. 3. M G A on CD-ROM and the W o r l d W i d e Web For almost half a century, the AMS has published the premier bibliographic research tool for the atmospheric and oceanic sciences in its secondary journal, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts CMGA). This journal scans the world's literature, covering over 200 journals, and provides abstracts for 9000 articles and reports each year. In addition to creating the monthly print publication of MGA, the resulting electronic database has been available for searching through DIALOG on-line services for over 20 years. For the past few years, MGA has also been available by subscription as a quarterly CD-ROM that contains the full 20-year backfile in addition to the most recent additions to the database. While MGA represents a valuable resource for searching the literature, its high cost of production and subsequent high subscription price make it a publication seen only in libraries serving the academic and research communities. The Society continues to strive to get the power of MGA onto the desktops of the scientist and students who should be taking advantage of its powerful capabilities for literature searches. This has resulted in the release of a World Wide Web version of MGA in Now, an institution can subscribe to the journal and provide MGA through its web interface to every desktop on the institution's comvol. 77, No. 9, September

3 puter network. This is an attractive solution for large institutions, but we continue to explore ways to make MGA available to individuals not directly affiliated with a research institution at a reasonable cost. 4. CD-ROM publications a. Conference and symposium preprint CD-ROM In January 1994, the AMS introduced a CD-ROM that contained the contents of conference and symposium preprint volumes for all meetings held in The AMS has continued the series since then, with CD-ROMs of the 1994 and 1995 preprint volumes being released at the beginning of each following year. Since preprint volumes are created from authorsupplied camera-ready copy, electronic files of the full text could not be created economically. Thus, this product allows a search of only the bibliographic data for each paper (title, author, author affiliation, conference where the paper was given, etc.), but the search engine is quite flexible and provides for browsing as well as searching. The text pages are available as bit-mapped images that can be viewed on the screen or printed to a laser printer at 300 DPI resolution. The 1993 and 1994 preprint CD-ROMs had user interfaces that supported just Macintosh and MS-DOS operating systems, but the 1995 CD-ROM also supports Windows and UNIX. The Windows and UNIX interfaces shipped with the 1995 CD-ROM will also allow viewing of the 1993 and 1994 discs. b. CD-ROM supplement to the print journals One of the driving forces behind the development of an electronic journal is providing a mechanism for authors to present their results using the sophisticated computer graphics techniques (such as animation) they use routinely in their research but that do not always translate well to the printed page. While Earth Interactions (described in the next section) will provide this for authors in the earth system sciences, another initiative currently under way will provide it for authors who publish in the print journals. In this initiative, authors can submit supplemental material augmenting their regular article, and these supplemental electronic files will be placed on a CDROM that will be mailed with the issue of the journal that contains their article. The articles will go through the scientific review process without inclusion of the supplemental material, so they have to be able to stand alone from it in both scientific quality and in their use Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society of figures within the print article. Notation will be made in the print article, however, that the supplemental material exists and can be found on the CD-ROM. The technical production of this supplement is quite straightforward. It will contain an HTML file serving as a local home page that will list and link to all the materials contained on the CD-ROM, as well as providing information on the articles they support. The materials supplied by the authors will be in forms readily accessible and viewable by standard World Wide Web browsers and their associated external viewers. A reader will simply launch his favorite web browser and open the CD-ROM's home page as a local URL, which will immediately provide access to all the supplement materials. The costs of production and mailing will be covered by author charges assessed to those authors who choose to place material on the CD-ROM supplement. In most cases, the charges assessed to authors will be comparable to the cost of a few color figures in a print article. At this time, CD-ROM supplements are currently in planning or production for Monthly Weather Review and Weather and Forecasting. It is anticipated that these pilot supplements will be followed by regular CD-ROM supplements in several AMS journals. c. Journal archive CD-ROM Many feel that a CD-ROM set containing the contents of the material published in the Society's journals in a form that allows full-text searching and viewing would be very useful to students and researchers. A product of this form had been under serious study for several years, but the cost of producing such an archive product has been so high that it was clearly impossible to recover expenses through sales. Now that the journals are composed entirely in PostScript, and with the emergence of Adobe Acrobat search and viewing software, the production costs have been dramatically lowered. These costs are still substantial, however, and it continues to be unclear if a product of this type can generate enough revenue to be financially self-supporting. Despite concerns about the financial viability of an archive CD-ROM, the Executive Committee has authorized the use of funds made available from Reserve Fund income to produce a year-end CD-ROM of the journal contents at the end of the 1996 volume year. The product will be a CD-ROM set, produced at the end of this year, containing the complete contents of all seven technical journals and much of the Bulletin for It is 2025

4 hoped that a product of this type will eventually yield sufficient income to become self-supporting. 5. Electronic j o u r n a l E a r t h Interactions As stated in the introduction, the recently launched electronic journal, Earth Interactions, represents the major electronic publishing initiative of the Society. Planning for this journal started in 1992, at which time two important decisions were made: 1) the Society should seek to undertake a bold initiative in electronic publishing that would go beyond the limitations of the printed page, and as a result, this publication should be independent of the established print journals; and 2) this effort should be carried out as a collaborative effort among similar societies to spread the risk and increase the likelihood of success. The electronic journal that grew out of this extensive planning effort is a collaborative effort in which the American Geophysical Union and the Association of American Geographers are joining with the AMS as copublishers. The Oceanography Society and the Ecological Society of America have been active in the planning of the new journal and continue to cooperate on this project. Earth Interactions is an interdisciplinary journal serving the disciplines of the earth system sciences. Major support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in the form of both direct financial support and significant technical support from the NASA/Goddard Distributed Active Archive Center, has allowed rapid development of this journal over the past year. Electronic journals are being launched by scholarly and commercial publishers at a staggering rate currently, and much is being written about them (Taubes 1996). There is, however, a wide spectrum of levels of functionality among the current electronic journals, from merely providing the pages of a print journal in electronic form to the inclusion of datasets, sophisticated graphics (such as animations), and other components that can be delivered effectively electronically. A great deal of effort is going into ensuring that Earth Interactions takes the fullest advantage possible of the current and future capabilities of the electronic medium. Seitter and Holoviak (1996) provide a detailed review of how this new journal is being structured and produced. It is hard not to be excited by the potential of a journal like Earth Interactions, and an enormous amount of effort is being invested into this project by AMS 2030 Headquarters staff, the staffs of the copublishing societies, and the volunteer editorial board to try to reach that potential. Interested readers can learn more about Earth Interactions, and follow its progress, by accessing the j o u r n a l ' s home page at EarthInteractions.org with their favorite web browser. 6. A M S W o r l d W i d e W e b site In September of 1995, the AMS launched its home page on the Internet, and this web site, at has been expanding its volume of information content ever since. The AMS phased out its gopher server, which had been the Society's means of disseminating information over the Internet for the past two years, during the first few months of Throughout the development of the AMS web site, emphasis has been placed on providing through it information that would be useful to the Society's members first, scientists and researchers in the community second, and the general public third. Emphasis has also been placed on material that is especially time sensitive, such as the meetings calendar and calls for papers, so that individuals can access this information as soon as possible and in some cases as much as a month before it first appears in a print publication such as the Bulletin. Thz AMS Newsletter, previously published in print only and available through paid subscription, began distribution via the web site as a free electronic publication in January The improved timeliness of this publication, as well as making it freely available to a much larger readership, is a prime example of the Society's efforts to improve service to the community. /.Conclusions All scientific societies are in the midst of major efforts to increase their use of electronic publishing techniques. Many have consciously chosen one or two electronic publishing experiments to carry out as first efforts so that they can show progress quickly. The AMS has taken a somewhat different approach. The Society has chosen to establish initiatives in any aspect of electronic publishing in which the path appeared to be clearly defined and in which there was a clear benefit to the scientific community. This has resulted in a variety of initiatives being worked on in Vol. 77, No. 9, September

5 parallel. None of these initiatives, however, is considered an "experiment" in electronic publishing. Rather, each represents a commitment by the Society to take advantage of the available technology to serve the science and the community in the best possible way. While each of the initiatives has been described here as somewhat independent of the others, an effort has been made whenever possible to tie together similar attributes of the activities to efficiently take advantage of staff training and expertise. Most importantly, the significant hardware, software, and staff training issues associated with the largest initiative, Earth Interactions, have been used to provide an underpinning for several of the other initiatives. Thus, the external funding and Society cost sharing associated with the electronic journal is being leveraged to provide additional service to segments of the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences that are not directly impacted by the publication of Earth Interactions. References Seitter, K., and J. Holoviak, 1996: Earth Interactions: An electronic journal serving the earth system science community. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 77, xxx-xxx. Taubes, G., 1996: Science journals go wired. Science, 271, ) iw 13th Conference on Inadvertent Weather Modification 28 January-2 February 1996 Atlanta, Georgia PREPRINT VOLUME 1;* w - Numerical Cloud Models Warm Season Cloud Modification Hail and Other Severe Storms Modification Inadvertent Weather Modification Global Role of the Private Sector in Weather Modification Applications Cold Season/Orographic Cloud Modification American Meteorological Society 1996 American Meteorological Society. Softbound, B&W, 190 pp., $60.00 list/$35.00 members (includes shipping and handling). Please send prepaid orders to: Order Department, American Meteorological Society, 45 Beacon St., Boston, MA Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2025