So we contacted Crossaig, Ltd., a subsidiary of ISI in Helensburgh, Scotland. This firm is in the business of converting journal files from print to electronic format. So when you call up a PDF file of an article on the Web, it looks identical to the original. Free Adobe Acrobat Reader software permits you to read and print out a copy. While it is almost impossible to obtain 100 percent accuracy in OCR scanning, it is possible to achieve a level of accuracy that is acceptable for searching since there is considerable redundancy in most scientific or scholarly texts.
Perfect transcription requires human proofreading and keying.
So when you access most scientific journals online today, you have the option of printing reprints from PDF original format via the Adobe Acrobat software, or you can quickly print the less formatted, but bulkier, HTML version. Creating the HTML version also involves the arduous task of hot-linking footnotes and superscripts. So when you encounter a cited reference, there is a hypertext link to the full text of the cited essay or other work. It is the utopian expectation of those who live in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create Web sites containing the full text of all their papers and books or links to them wherever they reside. The social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has major consequences for the future.