Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!apple!bionet!NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV!pkarp From: pkarp@NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV (Peter Karp) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix Subject: abstracts Message-ID: Date: 7 Aug 90 13:58:59 GMT Sender: daemon@genbank.BIO.NET Lines: 22 Well I wish someone had mentioned this idea of posting abstracts earlier because I had about 10 of them online that we used to prepare the printed proceedings from, but I deleted them after the meeting. I guess I can get them from a backup tape. I assume the plan is to put them on Dan's server rather than mail them to the list! I would be interested to hear a summary of Patricia Morgan's (from Science) comments, particularly since we don't have a hardcopy abstract from her. My recollection is that she offered two arguments against the viability of electronic publication: current electronic publishing cannot handle the halftones needed to publish photographs, and the process is simply too expensive for current libraries to afford. It occurs to me that probably less than 5% of the papers in any computer science journal (except for computer vision) contain photographs, so the importance of the first argument is probably discipline dependent. Also, when I mentioned the second argument to a friend they commented, "who needs libraries anyway?". That is, we could have direct distribution from publishers to readers. Peter