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Electronic
publishing:
Are we ready?
Dr. Masood Jawaid*
The history of electronic
publishing is very short. The very first e-publication came in 1980s in
the form of text e-mails. Later, CD-ROMs appeared to be a much more
effective medium with excellent quality pictures, low-cost support, and
long life. In 1994–95 appeared the very first e-journal distributed by
Electronics Letters Online by Institution of Electrical Engineers.1
World Wide Web started in 1995–96 and was an immediate success. Now
e-publications enter in the Era of downloading in handheld devices like
PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
There are many advantages of e-publishing which includes quick full text
availability worldwide which increases the readership, and faster
editing with the use of latest software tools. Production time is
shortened by eliminating printing, binding, shipping and by publishing
articles when they’re ready, thus eliminating backlogs of accepted
articles. Cost of producing e-journal is lower than print journal. New
Modes like audio and video can be included. Different journals are using
e-alerts of their table of contents and also publishing articles in
advance as future articles.
There are three models of e-publishing: traditional, alternate and
sub-service.1 The traditional model which is used by all the online
journals of Pakistan is availability of online edition in parallel to
their paper edition. The alternate model is based on the availability of
the e-edition only and subservice model composed only of a table of
contents (TOC), with pointers to the selected articles that remain in
publicly available domains as e-archives.
There are about 54 biomedical journals published from Pakistan. Out of
them Pakistan Medical & Dental Council (PMDC) has recognized about
forty. Only 16 have online editions available and all are free of
charge. Majority of Pakistani journals provide just the Portable
Document Format (pdf) versions because it can be made in a few seconds
without any extra efforts. Moreover, its very easy for IT companies to
upload article in pdf format to complete the formality. Abstracts are
helpful for the readers who just want to see the highlights of an
article and in the same way html full text is downloaded fast and do not
require a third party software like Acrobat Reader. All leading
international journals use all three formats to increase their
functionality. Currently, only three journals (Journal of Pakistan
Medical Association2, Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences3 and Rawal
Medical Journal4) have availability of abstract, full text in html and
pdf format available online.
There are many major issues relating to E-publishing in Pakistan. One of
them is Awareness. Publishers should be aware that the cost of running
electronic journal is about one tenth to the paper edition. Domain
registration is below Rs. 500/- per year and hosting packages are also
available at much reduced cost. There is much to do beyond the online
edition of any journal. We at the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences
(Pak J Med Sci) are in the planning phase of accepting videos, animation
and audio files with the manuscript for publishing. So far there is no
proper electronic publisher in Pakistan. Different journals hire IT
companies to do the job for them and they do not have properly trained
staff to sort out the emerging requirement of biomedical journals. There
is neither any IT company nor any journal is using XML tagging for their
journal which is the future for proper biomedical e-publishing. XML
tagging provided by companies outside Pakistan is very costly and not
feasible for us. There is no biomedical journal in Pakistan accepting
proper online submission. Email submission is accepted by many journal
but we need to go toward the online submission with proper online
reviewing process to utilize web more effectively. Being a developing
country we should be using our resources more effectively. One way of
doing this is by publishing ELPS (Electronic Long and Paper Short)
version of articles5. There is need to increase awareness and
acceptability of ELPS among publishers as well as authors.
There is still plenty of room for further progress as far as Electronic
publishing is concerned in Pakistan. Of course change is inevitable and
those publishers who fail to keep pace with the changing environment
will not be able to survive.
References
1. Pettenati C. Electronic
Publishing at the end of 2001. World Scientific 2001. (Available from
URL
http://villaolmo.mib.infn.it/Manuscripts/10_generalities/pettenati.pdf)
2. Journal of Pakistan Medical Association. (Available from URL
http://www.jpma.org)
3. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences. (Available from URL
http://www.pjms.com.pk)
4. Rawal Medical Journal (Available from URL
http://www.rmj.org.pk)
5. Schroter S, Barratt H, Smith J. Authors’ perceptions of electronic
publishing: two cross sectional surveys. BMJ 2004;328(7452):1350-3.
* Assistant Editor
Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences
E-mail: masood@masoodjawaid.com
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