Posted-Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 14:27:56 EDT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edstat-l
Date:         Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:27:56 EDT
Reply-To:     Tim Arnold <arnold@STAT.NCSU.EDU>
From:         Tim Arnold <arnold@STAT.NCSU.EDU>
Subject:      electronic journal
X-To:         edstat-l@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu

I agree with what Jerry Dallal says [concerning reader access to
electronic journals], to a point.  There are a lot of details to be
worked out still.  There are probably more headaches ahead than I can
imagine. And I don't think anyone would or should "submit an article
to a journal that was unavailable to a large percentage of the paper's
intended audience".

Of course, I don't agree that this is the case for the electronic
journal in question (for Statistics Education).  There already exist a
multitude of tools for both readers and authors in the electronic
medium.  The problem (currently) is one of communication about these
tools.

My part in the journal is to make sure that both readers and authors
are aware of the tools at their disposal during this "painful period
of transition in technology", at least until the time comes when
universal standards actually exist.

As for access:
Access is not that limited, if you know how to get it.  There are a
few ways of doing this, some for free, some for a few dollars.
Connections can be managed through the growing National Public
Telecomputing Network, and dial-up telephone services such as
PC-Pursuit.

So, access can be had, even today.  There are *several* reasons to have
access, not the least of which would be the existence of electronic
journals and discussion lists such as this one.  There are those who
have no access to the network and want to, I am sure, but their number
is decreasing (and will continue to decrease) since the funding of the
National Research and Education Network (NREN) seems certain. The
number of nodes on the Internet is growing exponentially. Certainly
the (easiest) method for getting access needs to be made explicit to
all potential readers/authors of the journal.

As for SGML:
SGML (Script Generalized Markup Language) is not something that either
readers or authors need to understand deeply, at least in the near
future.  A few word-processor companies (Word Perfect, Frame) are
developing SGML readers and converters.  This means that (once on the
market) both author and reader only need to know the word processor
package. Until that time, the journal staff has committed to the
necessary support to accept non-SGML papers, when necessary.
And why SGML in the first place? Because it gives the ability to know
the informational structure of a document, it will allow the journal
to be an informational database, not just a collection of letters and
dots.  Search and retrieval requests can be made on the entire
archived journal.

In addition, the benefit of electronic journals is not just that they
don't use paper resources.  There are things you can do in the
electronic medium which are impossible on paper.  Some people have
mentioned the possibility of including interactive graphics in an
article, or even video clips.  More exciting to me is the ability to
"ask" a journal a question and get an answer back from a "live"
database index, or the ability to request the dataset that was used in
an article.  Undoubtedly there are capabilities we haven't thought of
exploring yet.

[As a final note, let me say that the journal is _not_ ready to
produce a first issue, but is now still taking shape]

--Tim Arnold
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Arnold                      Instructional Computing
Internet: arnold@stat.ncsu.edu  North Carolina State Univ.
BITNET  : ARNOLD@NCSUSTAT       Dept. of Statistics, Raleigh NC 27695
Phone   : 919 515 2584          FAX: 919 515 7591
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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