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Introduction
"Electronic
publishing" refers to information/publications that are stored in computers.
The first widely successful automated electronic archive, developed in
1991 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the "arXiv e-print server"
for research papers in physics and related disciplines. Disciplines besides
physics went on to create e-print servers, where authors can make their
research open to everybody as soon as it is completed.
Electronic
publishing in biomedicine has brought many advantages such as sharing information,
faster and cheaper dissemination of research results, and distribution
to a wider audience, including scientists in developing countries and the
lay public. Besides traditional print journals, new online journals and
electronic journals are being published.
Although users
tend to prefer electronic publications to the printed version, especially
when they can link to the full text of the article, biomedical information
published on the Internet raises a series of questions about quality and
reliability, and the persistence of that information, i.e. archiving. Access
to biomedical electronic publications, journals or server repositories
is another outstanding question. Some publishers provide free access to
the abstract or to the full text; many others restrict access to subscribers
by employing a number of access control measures, such as IP address validation,
username/password or a combination of both.
There are
many different ranks of "electronic publishing" in the biomedical field,
varying from papers that have already been published in print journals
and have been adapted into electronic form, to scientific papers that are
only published electronically.
This scenario
produces a confusing range of terms defining electronic publications: prepublication,
preprint, e-print. We will use the terms "preprint" and "e-print" to refer
to two different kind of publication.
The purpose
of our preliminary exploratory study was to check the Sanofi-Synthelabo
research scientists' attitude to electronic preprint publication.
Material
and Methods
For this survey
we sent a questionnaire to scientists in eight Sanofi-Synthelabo research
centres in Europe and the United States.
Researchers
(chemistry and pharmacology) thus received a questionnaire investigating
their attitude about browsing pre-print publication servers, and using
e-print servers to disseminate their results.
Discussion
Electronic
journals and publications are widely used today among researchers. A study
on access to the biomedical literature in an academic biomedical library
showed that the electronic version was more used than ten times more often
than the print version.
A survey at
the Max Planck Institute found that access to electronic journals and publication
had become important for the top-level researchers and that their main
drawbacks were the lack of archiving, incomplete issues and lack of back
numbers.
Also at the
Sanofi-Synthelabo research centres electronic journals and publications
are widely used, but the survey shows that browsing pre-print or e-print
servers is not yet a widespread habit among researchers. Sanofi-Synthelabo
scientists consider e-print or pre-print servers a convenient way to share
their results with their colleagues. They particularly appreciate the numerous
advantages of these publications, such as no delay in publication, no space
constraints, enhanced presentation with multimedia data and the possibility
of linking references to other documents. Nevertheless, they would never
consider submitting their own papers to e-print servers rather than to
a traditional peer-reviewed journal or server.
These contradictory
results may be partially explained by the intellectual property problems
linked to electronic prepublication, such as authorship and/or priority
date of publication for patents. The lack of peer review and of being listed
in a well-known scientific journal, also play a role in these attitudes.
Although Sanofi-Synthelabo
researchers consider not peer-reviewed data as of secondary importance
or unreliable, they think that information published on e-print or pre-print
servers could lead them to modify a research project. This is because,
thanks to the rapid publication process, they quickly find out about competitor
teams working on the same topics.
Scientific
papers that are not peer reviewed and are published only electronically
can be considered like drafts that need to be shared quickly among researchers,
or as preliminary results that could benefit from input from a broader
research community. This new approach could shift the reader emphasis away
from high-impact factor journals as reference sources, and increase the
importance of specific articles rather than the journal in which they appear.
In any case,
when data are only published electronically authorship, plagiarism, and
"priority date of the publication" for patenting are potential problems.
Some American Science Associations, including the Association of Science,
Technical, and Medical Publishers have proposed two stages: "first publication"
in a permanent form to establish priority, and a refereed version as the
"definitive publication".
An important
point is whether the release of research findings prior to formal peer
review leads to the appropriate or inappropriate adoption of new finding
in clinical practice and could have an impact on the research projects,
leading their participants to make changes.
ClinMed Netprints
clearly warns that the articles posted in its site have not yet been accepted
for publication by a peer-reviewed journal and invite readers not to act
on the findings and journalists not to report them. Is this warning
respected? And what about the lay public?
The creation
of electronic free global repositories for primary literature in the life
sciences on the Internet has prompted the major scientific publishers and
organisations to cooperate in setting up an alternative to paper publication.
In any case,
in the opinion of most editors print journals are not doomed to extinction.
Print journals have the great advantage that they can be read anywhere.
The editors of BMJ report that the electronic and paper versions have two
different audiences that overlap only a little, meaning both are important
to readers, but in a free market high-cost/low circulation journals would
be forced to go electronic or disappear.
A group of
12,095 researchers signed an online petition calling for the establishment
of freely available, unrestricted databases: The Public Library of Science.
Researchers say they will stop buying, publishing in or reviewing for any
journal that refuses to place its research papers in the Public Library
of Science within six months of their initial publication.
It appeared
that we are still at the beginning of the electronic revolution in scientific
publishing. The next five years will see greater change.
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