Subject: Chemists Toy With the Preprint Future

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 01:19:50 -0700 (PDT)

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/289/5484/1445a

SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING: Chemists Toy With the Preprint Future

Robert F. Service

After watching their physics colleagues explore the digital landscape
of electronic preprints over the past decade, chemists are sending out
a survey party of their own.  Last week, the giant publishing house
Elsevier Science launched the first electronic archive for chemistry
preprints through its ChemWeb subsidiary. The new site
(preprint.chemweb.com) will be a common repository for reports on a
wide range of chemistry topics and a forum for authors and readers to
discuss the results. But ChemWeb could face an uphill battle in
convincing authors to post their papers on the site, as many of the
field's premier journals decline to accept papers that have already
been posted on the Web.

Physics envy. Elsevier is hoping its chemistry preprint archive will
prove as popular as the Los Alamos physics archive, use of which by
U.S.-based users is shown above.

CREDIT: ARXIV.ORG

ChemWeb's new preprint service is modeled closely on the physics
preprint archive started in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico, which today serves as a storehouse
for some 146,000 articles. Although readers of the new chemistry
preprints will be able to rank the papers, there will be no formal
peer review, says ChemWeb's preprint manager James Weeks. The service
is free to both authors and readers. (They need only register with
ChemWeb, which is also free.) ChemWeb, says Weeks, hopes that its new
service will generate enough Internet traffic to lure advertisers to
fund the site.

For now, about all the site is attracting is heated debate. "A
preprint server is highly controversial among chemists," said Daryle
Busch, president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), speaking at
the society's national meeting in Washington, D.C., last week. Busch,
a chemist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, says he and his
colleagues are lured by the Web's speed, wide dissemination, and low
cost of publishing new scientific results. But many researchers fear
that the absence of peer review will reduce the quality of submissions
and force readers to wade through electronic mounds of poor-quality
results in search of tidbits of worthwhile science. Says Peter Stang,
a chemist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, "It's a dilemma."

Apparently, it's one that a broad cross section of chemists are
struggling with. According to Robert Bovenschulte, head of ACS
publications, the association conducted a survey of some 8000 of its
members last summer on the question of non-peer- reviewed electronic
preprints. The results "are a very mixed bag," Bovenschulte says. "A
lot of people were in favor of it. A lot of people were against it."

Nevertheless, the new preprint archive likely faces a tough future,
because ACS journal editors themselves are lined up against it. ACS,
the world's largest scientific membership organization, with 161,000
members, also publishes many of the premiere journals in the field
including the flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society. But
nearly all ACS journal editors consider posting results on the Web to
constitute "prior publication," says Bovenschulte. (Science maintains
the same policy.) As a result, Bovenschulte says, those ACS journals
will not publish papers that appear first on ChemWeb's preprint
server. And that, says Ralph Nuzzo, a chemist at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, would convince him and most of his
colleagues not to post their articles on ChemWeb. "If I couldn't
publish my paper [in a conventional journal], I probably wouldn't do
it," Nuzzo says.

In an effort to find a compromise, Weeks says ChemWeb will remove the
full text of papers from the site when they are published in a print
journal, keeping an abstract and a link to the journal article. But
Bovenschulte says ACS journals would still not consider such papers,
because the results would already be public knowledge.

Not all journals are playing hardball. Ginsparg points out that
American Physical Society journals, including the prominent Physical
Review Letters, not only publish articles already posted on the Los
Alamos preprint server, but even provide the electronic connections
for authors to submit to the journals at the click of a button.

Elsevier's own journals will publish articles that appear first on
ChemWeb. Indeed, Elsevier--which is ACS's chief competitor in the
chemistry journal publishing business--may be counting on ChemWeb to
give its journals an edge among some chemists. Elsevier officials may
be hoping that researchers interested in distributing results quickly
will then send their articles to Elsevier journals, says
Bovenschulte. For Elsevier, he says, "this could be considered a cost
of attracting the best authors."

Whatever the motivation, chemistry preprints are long overdue, says
R. Stephen Berry, a chemist at the University of Chicago. The culture
among chemists--with their history of close ties to industry--is more
conservative than that among physicists, says Berry. Still, Berry
believes that chemistry preprints have a shot. "We just have to wait
and see if it works," he says. "But this is the kind of experiment we
should be doing."