On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Steve Kurtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>FYI.
>
>Steve
>=====================================
>
>
>E-mail delivers scientific papers to poor nations
>Katie Mantell
>
>Researchers in the world's poorest nations -- where Internet connections
>can be slow or prohibitively expensive -- can now receive some
>scientific papers free of charge by electronic mail.
>
>The eJournals Delivery Service, which began operating in January, allows
>developing-world scientists to search and download up to three articles
>per day from selected journals using e-mail only.
>
>Several publishing companies have joined the programme, including
>Academic Press, the American Physical Society and World Scientific.
>
>The initiative -- launched by the Abdus Salam International Centre for
>Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the Third World Academy of Sciences
>(TWAS), both based in Trieste, Italy -- comes on the heels of a number
>of programmes that aim to increase the availability of scientific
>literature in developing countries by providing free or cut-price access
>to the electronic version of scientific journals.
>
>But in some areas, scientists have found it difficult to take up the
>offers because, although they have e-mail, they do not have full
>Internet connections.
I suppose this is useful, but the truth is, in physics, the published
journals (electronic or otherwise) are very much a secondary path
of communication, and have been for about fifteen or twenty years.
They are useful for keeping up on things which are in neighbouring
related fields, but for the hot stuff in your own field, the need
to get the current information fast brought about informal mailing
lists for email communication of preprints, as the process of
getting an article reviewed, accepted, and then queued for print
was just way too long for the speed of advance in research. Physicists
were among the first people in the world to be electronically
networked, pretty much right alongside the comsci guys who developed
the system. With the means to do so, circumventing the delay inherent
in the publishing system was just natural. The official journal article
is just a sort of stamp of final approval, now.
In many, but noteably not all cases, everyone whose research is
directly impacted by a paper has usually seen it six months or more
before it appears in a journal edition. Of course, that "everybody"
is the community of researchers,, and it could be argued that there
are some who should be included but are not, due to vagueries of
the politics and social nets of the academic world. I don't have
the knowledge to speak to that. The noteable exceptions to this
system are where a major result from a large experimental group
is held back until it is fully rechecked, and published simultaneously
with a press conference, for maximum impact, which looks good for
the funding agencies, especially where the result is not crucial for
some other ongoing research. A good example of this sort of thing is
the SNO solar neutrino paper, which was a collaboration of over a hundred
contributors, and was worked up over a one year period, having to
be almost completely rewritten at one point as the data analysis
took an unexpected turn. During this period, the head of the experiment
was alleged to have said to all the collaborators anyone who leaks
word of these results has his name taken off the paper. Another aspect
of this sort of paper is that it doesn't sit in the publishing queue
for a long time, as can happen with minor papers, so that delay is
not an issue, and with the cost of the experiment, everyone
wants the paper to be bulletproof when it finally appears.
-Pete Vincent
