Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!snorkelwacker!bionet!NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV!pkarp From: pkarp@NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV (Peter Karp) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix Subject: Re: electronic publishing Message-ID: Date: 7 Aug 90 18:07:53 GMT Sender: daemon@genbank.BIO.NET Lines: 57 I must thank Bob for pointing out some ambiguities in my posting regarding electronic publishing. Actually Bob, I don't think my message contained any false assertions, only a lack of detail that when interpreted in particular ways could easily yield false propositions. Believe it or not, I as a computer scientist actually prefer to read scientific articles in paper form (for asthetic reasons that I can't quite put my finger on), and my reason for asking others to summarize Morgan's arguments is that I found it very interesting to hear the perspective of a publishing professional who had actually looked into the problem. To elaborate on the question of postscript as a graphics standard, I took Morgan's comments at the meeting to mean that she didn't believe that there existed a *technical* solution to the problem of specifying graphics within documents -- Postscript is clearly such a solution. I think the question of whether Postscript constitutes an adequate *standard* for specifying graphics is an open question. Sure, I've also had trouble FTPing Postscript documents around the Internet, but this is not proof that someone can't sit down and write a standard for a "Universal Postscript" that most printers should be able to handle. I simply don't believe that there is a major problem in specifying graphics within documents. As I wrote earlier, halftones do appear to represent an important problem for many disciplines. Yes, it's true that not everyone has a Postscript printer; I certainly wouldn't argue that we can install worldwide electronic publishing tomorrow. When the first television stations started broadcasting not everyone owned a TV; we should expect that it will take time for new technology to come into widespread use. My "who needs libraries" comment was not meant to imply that we should close all libraries tomorrow -- sorry for being so flip here. I was simply implying that we should expect new technologies to create new patterns of useage. Morgan seemed to expect that libraries would serve as the distribution point for electronically-published documents, but in the future this may not be the case. The person I talked to was implying that the right now the computer science community has adequate technology in place to simply circumvent libraries for the distribution phase -- and perhaps even for the archival of future computer science publications if they will all fit on a few dozen CD ROMs. I quite agree that the biology community does not have this technology in place now, and that conversion of existing documents would be problematic. My overall conclusion is not that we should expect electronic publishing to be feasible for all types of documents in all disciplines tomorrow, nor that we should close down all University libraries tomorrow. That is, I'm not the boundless optimist that my first message may have implied. However, I'm also not the bounded pessimist that I concluded Morgan is. Although I believe Morgan and Robbins have both identified many important problems that are impossible for us to solve in the short term, I believe that there are a substantial number of problems that we can solve in the short term; we shouldn't let the existence of some hard problems deter us from forging ahead on the easy ones. Peter