On Jun 2, 6:22pm, Rzepa, Henry wrote:

Subject: Screen vs Paper for E-journals <snip> So, is the near future of electronic chemistry journals destined to be simply a delivery mechanism for documents that if destined to be read by the reader, have to be printed? Or should the chemistry community be pressing learned society and commercial publishers for e-journals that can deliver "models" encoded via software rather than words, and to develop non-printable ways of archiving such information?

When I ask colleagues about this I see an almost generational split. Chemists of all flavors older than some unquantified number seem to prefer paper. Even in the younger crowd (under 50?) many prefer paper. It might be tempting to ascribe this to an age-related issue, but I think the reasons lie elsewhere. In my opinion electronic representations still suffer from poor scanning and page flipping capabilities. If you happen to be very focussed on a particular paragraph or two then you don't need this and it is less of an issue. If the item you are focussing on also contains value-added VRML then you would welcome the new capability perhaps even at the expense of the loss of scannability. The trouble comes from the fact that one very often needs to scan prior to digging into the details and even PDF docs are not very good for this, performance is just not there, one has to zoom in and out, pages take to long to draw, the viewer takes too long to start up. Some of this will no doubt improve as both depiction code and hardware speed up. But the standard monitors/resolution/page sizes will take longer to address. I beleive that the 'older' folks are often people in a position that requires them to be able to scan larger numbers of documents quickly rather than digest fewer in depth. This is particularly bad for electronic presentations at this time. Thus it is not so much age as it is function (manager) and that function and age are often correlated. The sort-term strategy might be to keep published electronic documents very short, only one idea per document. To make this valuable there needs to be a longer term plan to allow for integration of these documents into a more comprehensive work. I think this is where the real challenge lies. To build a meta-document 'integrator'. Think of it as a dynamic page generator that takes the underlying elements as targets that it must build links for. This is a bottom-up outlining tool, rather than top-down. I imagine a browser-like interface that allows you to tag element pages with properties such as "Background", "Data evidence", "hypothesis", "flame-bait" together with a unique project (publication?) code. Given document elements could have multiple project codes attached to facilitate zillion part articles. Then a standardized chemistry (science?) journal article browser would know how to assemble the parts. With standardized elements there could be greater transparent hyperlinking between elements. This would be my suggestion to address the scannability issue. Make it more scannable by having more dynamic outline/in-depth control. Find a way to make existing monitor sizes fit the data to them, rather than trying to reproduce the printed page more accurately. Today's web browsers already do this with a standard web-page. We just need it to happen transparently in a chemistry article. We need to make the article inherently scannable, not the depiction. To do this requires thinking do define the elements and not just technology. -- M. Dominic Ryan (610)-270-6529 SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals ryanmd@mms.sbphrd.com King of Prussia, PA chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)