Re: AIP Journals - Version of Record

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

I am sure that all those who have written in so far are making a point
that is very relevant to the future development of electronic journals in
hoping that the online version will soon be the version of record. Peter
Boyce will no doubt soon tell us how his organisation overcame the serious
practical problems that Tim Ingoldsby very fairly sets out. For these and
no doubt other reasons it will take time. Last year I surveyed a
substantial number of British journal publishers and none of them
(presumably for 2000) were intending to make the online version the
normative one.

For the present however I want to ask AIP and other physics publishers who
have arrangements like EPAPS exactly what the status of the material
deposited in this service is. Do AIP regard it the EPAPS material as a
separate publication? Will they give the material a DOI and, if so, how
will the metadata describe it?  This is not just a question of the
definition of a publication but also (for librarians and end-users) how
you retrieve and what you call it? At least that is my picture.


Anthony Watkinson
14, Park Street, Bladon, Woodstock,
Oxon, England OX20 1RW
phone +44 1993 811561 and fax 1993  810067

----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Ingoldsby <TINGOLDSBY@AIP.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2000 6:17 AM
Subject: RE: AIP Journals - Version of Record


Gary, I am going to step in and answer this one directly, since I had
helped Christine to prepare the response to Garrett's comment.

You are correct, authors certainly will begin to submit multimedia
elements with their articles.  In fact, a few have already.  However, so
far these elements have not been treated as "essential," meaning they were
not subject to peer review by the same scientists who reviewed the article
text, references, figures, and tables.  As a result, they have been
included in AIP's Electronic Physics Auxiliary Publishing Service (EPAPS)
repository.  In this repository, they are freely available for download,
and the author pays a submittal fee, similar to article page charges, but
retrieval is free.  (See http://www.aip.org/pubservs/epaps.html for
details regarding EPAPS.)

There are several reasons why multimedia, up to this point, has been
treated separately from other aspects of a research article:

i.  Many physicists who serve as referees lack appropriate equipment
and/or training to download, run, and evaluate multimedia.
ii.  Ditto for most editors of journals.
iii.  Most editorial offices lack the infrastructure and trained support
personnel to receive multimedia submissions and manage them throughout the
editorial review process.

AIP is in the process of fixing (ii) and (iii), and (i) will cure itself
naturally over time.  Fortunately, we have been able to ease our way into
this new era slowly, so we have a little time to incorporate new hardware,
software, and training required to truly support multimedia.  We have been
working with the Acoustical Society of America and its innovative journal,
Acoustics Research Letters Online ( http://ojps.aip.org/ARLO/ ) to pilot
test procedures and equipment.  We have also relied on the advice we
receive from our publishing advisory committees to put things into place.
So, you can expect AIP to make the shift to "online is the version of
record" very soon.

Best regards,


Tim Ingoldsby
Director of Business Development
American Institute of Physics
2 Huntington Quadrangle, Suite 1NO1
Melville, NY 11747-4501
Phone:  +1 516 576-2265
Fax:  +1 516 576-2327
Email:  tingoldsby@aip.org