Tuesday, August 22, 2000

As Experts Call for a Chemistry Preprint Server, Elsevier Unveils Its Own By LILA GUTERMAN Washington Chemists should start a Web server to post research papers before their publication in print journals, experts said Sunday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. "Conventional wisdom says that e-prints are not compatible with the culture of chemistry," said Ann Wolpert, a librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she and three other panelists urged that the society try out this form of publishing, which they described as more efficient, democratic, and scholarly than the current print-journal system. "A.C.S. is the one who really should tap into this for chemistry," said Robert Schwarzwalder, head of information services for Ford Motor Company's research library. "If it's not you, it will be someone else." His prophecy has already come true. Elsevier Science, the society's fiercest competitor in publishing chemistry journals, unveiled a preprint server Monday on its ChemWeb site, at http://preprint.chemweb.com. (To use the site, you must register for ChemWeb membership, which is free.) Bill Town, ChemWeb's director of operations, told The Chronicle that 18 papers were submitted to the site before it was opened to the public. Each article posted on the site will be free to users and become "the center of a discussion group." He added: "It's all really an experiment. Our approach is to try to improve on what preprint servers have done before." R. Stephen Berry, a chemist at the University of Chicago, told the Chemical Society audience here that experimentation is the key. "Let's try everything we can," he said. He said that even the sticky question of who pays for a preprint server should be solved through trial and error. Mr. Schwarzwalder emphasized that preprint servers offer corporate researchers the important benefit of currency. Long lead times mean that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is often little more than a "stamp of approval," he said. But all of the panelists had concerns that widespread use of preprint servers could undermine the peer-review system. Peter J. Stang, a chemist at the University of Utah and the editor of The Journal of Organic Chemistry, paraphrased Winston Churchill: "Confidential peer review is the worst form of evaluation, except for all of the others." He said he doubted that working scientists would have time to comment on papers posted online. "The main problem of preprint servers," he said, "is separating the reliable, good, and valuable results from the mountain of data." He also wondered whether chemists would post papers online, since many journals -- including those of the A.C.S., but not those published by Elsevier -- refuse to publish papers once they've appeared on the Web. Still, he said, "we should clearly avail ourselves of the advantages that preprint servers offer." Robert D. Bovenschulte, the director of the publications division of the A.C.S., said that the society had previously discussed the idea of starting a server but had been "bedeviled" by the issues brought up at the forum. "We are trying to push toward a statement of policy in the near future," he said. Background articles from The Chronicle: NIH Proceeds With On-Line Archive for Papers in the Life Sciences (9/10/1999) Idea of On-Line Archives of Papers Sparks Debate on Future of Journals (7/9/1999) On-Line Archive in Political Science Gains a Following (7/17/1998) Journals Differ on Whether to Publish Articles That Have Appeared on the Web (7/17/1998) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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