Page 132 - How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 8th Edition 8th Edition

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Chapter 20
Electronic Publishing Formats: Cd-Rom and Distributed Printing

Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
—J. K. Galbraith

Both CD-ROM publishing and electronic distributed printing offer scientists new and better ways to disseminate their
research to a wider audience. New electronic publishing formats are replacing microfiche and microfilm as the most
convenient ways to store archived material for access and print. The CD-ROM format can store the entire print output
of a conference or several months' worth of a scientific journal on a single CD. Distributed printing means compiling
a book made up of chapters put together from materials taken from various sources, including other books and journal
articles. Teachers can select and combine study guides for their courses; scientists can put together hand-outs for
research labs; and scientists can prepare materials for conferences and seminars. Compilers can make selections for
distributed printing from electronic databases supplied by a publisher or university, or from copies of printed material.
Printing and binding of the compiled material is done by a complex high-speed copy machine, such as the Xerox
DocuTech printer.

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CD-ROM Publishing

Publishing on CD-ROM allows the storage of immense amounts of information in a relatively stable format. The
lightweight CD takes up little space and is therefore easy to transport and store. Text, images, and even short movies
and animations can be stored on a CD to be played back at will. New material can be easily and inexpensively added
to CD-ROM master files, and a new CD can be remastered and issued as an update.

CD-ROM applications can be interactive, containing links between various portions of the text it contains. Links can
also be made to an animated visual or QuickTime movie of a process. Scholarly publishers are beginning to
implement this extra layer to some of their CD reprints; at the rate technology is changing, such an animated visual is
something to think about for future work. When assembling your data, you may have made movies of some of the
processes for other purposes. You may also have considered preparing simple animations for processes that are not
visible to the eye because they are too small, too far away, or too fast or slow in time. Animations can be far more
descriptive than individual drawings, if they can be linked to your report or paper. Although the standard scientific
paper submitted to a journal does not yet contain this kind of electronic material, many will probably do so in the near
future. In their book Visualization of Natural Phenomena (1993), Robert S. Wolff and Larry Yaeger discussed how
motion in natural phenomena has been captured electronically, and included a CD of examples in QuickTime.
The American Chemical Society <http://pubs.acs.org/> provides subscriptions to its publications on disk. Each disk is
a separate issue containing the original text of the print version. The CD version is hypertext linked with additional
graphs, charts, and tables, provided in either color or black and white. Hypertext is a method of creating and
displaying text that can be connected, even when both items are parts of the same document, or when one item is from
another related graphic or document stored elsewhere on a CD or in a network. Footnotes are linked to text and
figures directly. If a subscriber wishes to print an article, reproduction is laser-sharp.

Like many other major publishers, the American Society for Microbiology <http://www.asmusa.org> is in the process
of providing online

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