Subject: Re: CCL:Electronic Publishing

From: [email-masked] (Dr. Tom Pierce)
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 1994 08:00:17 +22305350 (EST)

Previously, Rainer Stumpe 100012,1163 wrote:
> Subj: Re: Electronic Publishing
> 
> No, I do not have access to WWW nor do I use Mosaic. It is now
> only a few months that we have direct access to Internet. It
> took years of discussions with the operating organizations to
> get that access (there was a lot of suspicion that we would
> misuse public information media for commercial purposes).
> 
> Yes, we have an obsolete main frame in-house computer system.
> There are only few high-tech workstations available to the
> Springer staff. It is not so much the cost for such equipment,
> it is a problem of training people. Our employes have to work
> for products that we can sell and earn their salaries. One can
> expect learning to master new systems in their free time only
> from a few, but they are there, others will follow.
> 
This is the price of new technology. We paid it when we learned
to use RJE computer access, when we got terminals on our desks, 
and when we moved to desktop/home PCs & Macs. Would any of
us go back - I doubt it. Discussing the costs merely prevents us
from considering the advantages, and learning the new opportunities
that are being revealed. 

I do use Mosaic, about three months after I started using gopher.
Wow, I think these are the so-called Killer-apps of the multimedia
technology. The advantages of disseminating information/documents
of the internet using gopher/WWW (mosaic is a WWW client) are 
stunning.  I am not sure that "publishing" is really the right
work for these opportunities. Information sharing certainly is,
and rapid dissemination of data and documents is possible, ie the 
Hubble pictures available with hours (minutes?) of their 
measurements. The basic two advantages of this approach in 
my mind are, immediate release on a worldwide basis to interested
people, and a much higher level of interest in the specifics of
that information within the audience.   

Often I ignore journals that could have useful publications in them
because I have to wade through so many uninteresting reports.  
Alternatively, I can 'search' the gopherspace or WWW for 
titles that match just what I am interested in WHEN I want the information.
This convenience and specificity is part of the power of the Internet.

> Can e-publishing lower the cost of information? Well, should
> it?.... So, I do not believe information will become

Nope, this is measurably not true. The cost of some publications
will remain the same, such as large scale publications like Readers Digest.
However the cost of other 'publications' has dropped. The use of copying
machines has reduced the price of printing small publications. Desktop
publishing has spawned a huge number of specific newsletters, magazines,
and advertising brochures. Scientific Publishing is so specific an 
interest that 'e-journals' might be quite cost effective.

I look forward to the time when chemists can 'share' research information
as fast as our Physics and Math colleagues do through preprint servers 
gopher servers, WorldWide Web servers, and perhaps even electronic
journals with articles composed solely of topics chosen by the reader
instead of the publisher or editor. It should be very interesting. 

-- 
Sincerely, Thomas Pierce - [email-masked]  -  Computational Chemist
"These opinions are those of the writer and not the Rohm and Haas Company."

---

From: [email-masked] (David C. Doherty)
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 1994 12:15:55 -0600 (CST)

Rainer Stumpe wrote:
>
>All this discussion started with the question of color plates.
>Let me comment my personal view. And I am limiting myself to
>sciences (not arts, not medicine). Color may distract attention
>or focus it on a minor issue (I use color transparencies in
>presentations if I have something to hide). Black-and-white
>line drawings have their advantage over multicolored area
>graphs (not only in sciences): the viewer cannot easily be
>cheated, the psychology is better known (e.g. using logarithmic
>scale). I do believe, color should be used sparsely and applied
>only where necessary. Would you prefer watching the movie
>"Casablanca" in color?
>
>
Colorized Bogart aside, this is a specious argument
against the use of color. It makes the assumption that
the mapping of color to the quantities of interest is 
indeterminate.  This need not be the case.  If the color
scheme is carefully chosen (and described to the audience),
a color presentation can reveal important aspects of
a set of data which cannot be seen otherwise.  

In my own work (on phase transitions of crystalline polymers),
I have found the use of color visualization tools to be
invaluable in identifying phenomena (soliton wave propagation
as an example) which I couldn't find in other ways.  The
use of gray-scale version of a figure in a recent paper of mine 
was necessitated by outrageous (IMHO) page and reprint
charges for color expected by the journal (PRL).  This is
unfortunate for the reader because the color version was
much more effective in conveying the same point.

It is true that color can be used to "hide" or overemphasize
certain aspects of the data. Intentional use in this manner
is simply unscrupulous; naive misuse should be identified 
and corrected. But I don`t believe that color needs to be 
singled out in these instances any more than a poorly 
described (or applied) theory.  

The use of color to present data requires that its 
use be appropriate, well-described and understood.

This is no different than anything else that we do.

Dave Doherty

ps. I can provide postscript versions of the aforementioned
figure upon request. Inspection of the gray-scale and
color versions should demonstrate my points.  Of course,
reading the paper to understand what they represent
is highly advised ;-).
-- 

David C. Doherty
Minnesota Supercomputer Center
[email-masked]