Electronic Data
Highways:how far must Scientists and States responsabilities go?
Electronic Data
Highways:Nowadays scientific information flow overtakes unexpected characterisitcs as regards to:
Electronic information flow, having become an imperative asset to the scientific comunity, leads us to an urgent discussion: what should we require from modern States, which are their responsabilities?
But another question ought to be posed, too: what must we demand from ourselves?
KEY WORDS : information retrieval; electronic networks; electronic journals; hypertext links
As this century gets close to its turn, some patterns within the realm of Science and Technology become steadily present:
These patterns get more and more clear to any observer, even a layman, but it is hard not to recall some examples to stress their presence in our day-to-day life:
The mathematical bases for computerized tomography were laid by Radon in 1917. His results, known within mathematicians clusters as Radon transform, were employed only in the 70’s as the theoretical foundations to build an industrial apparatus currently of paramount importance to medicine. At this same time, the liquid cristal was discovered. But it was already a must for everybody’s watches, TV and computer console screens in the early 80’s, long before its discoverer got the 1991 Chemistry Nobel Prize.
Studies like Computational Ecology demand expertise from a wide range of professionals, which encompasses Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Mechanics, Informatics. Questions like transport and disposal of nuclear waste, international pollution and satellite assessment to national security data beneath international law demand a knowledge that can only be gotten through a multidisciplinary pool. By the same token, gatherings of experts from different areas, having in common the performing of computer simulation and under the umbrella of what has been labelled as laboratories for computational sciences, are spreading everywhere. All these facts are also manifest when one looks at the great number of new journals with multidisciplinary scope recently edited.
For a long time physicists were aware of the need to get simpler and faster ways to move around the huge amount of numerical data they generate during their laboratory accelerators experiences. These data must be processed in large scale computers, through what is known as “number crunching”. Being then often forced to access computers from remote sites, physicists were the main pushers of the electronic networks, without having foreseen the possibilities the “net” would bring for everybody: to transform information flow through a forward jump as important as that one launched by Gutenberg centuries ago.
The real possibilities of any new discovery or technological result are quite often hidden by its bombastic newborn looks. But science people were very quick in realizing the great opening for communication the electronic networks were putting at their hands. Rapidly e- mail became a routine to help in the organizing of meetings, the editing of journals, the exchanging of research data, the writing of joint papers by co-authors geographically far apart. Electronic journals started also to pop up. Besides the shortening of backlog, convenient access through the network - freeing readers from trips to libraries and from library schedules -, the new media could offer alternate ways to improve information disseminating: to include motion figures as well as to couple sound devices, thus bringing “journal” articles quite close to a real live lecture (proofreadings allowed). But how really deep are these innovations as regards to knowledge flow? Would they be merely cosmetic changes, just like the introduction of color print, which beautifies papers presentation but definitely has lacked to bring a new qualitatative step? There are indeed two great leaps forward the new electronic media discloses and that can never be over-emphasized. One touches the multidisciplinary road. The other one unveils a real different way to look at periodicals.
Journals have always been thought, edited, read as a repository of knowledge in a well-defined period, for a certain field. In some sense, each issue or each volume contains snapshots of a piece of human learning at a given moment. Let us just underline the static character of this documentation, we do not have even to point out how transient our visions and perspectives, our results and doubts, our definitions and concepts, our priorities and neglects are, in any field.
Once a paper is published, which are its consequences, influences, contributions? One could answer quite vaguely that it certainly is one of the bricks mankind needs to raise the edifice of knowledge. The bricks (or the walls) a paper rests upon are usually acknowledged, being displayed as bibliographical data. But what is now being asked for is a walk in the opposite time direction, “Which will be the bricks that will lay upon a given article?”. We could think of this as a quest to forward references. Some routines were developed to deal with this matter, as time goes by and the article gets older and more well known (or maybe not), the pioneer work having been conducted by ISI[1] and its Science Citation Indices.
The links employed by hyper-texts provide a tool for electronic journals to deal with this important point. In the electronic way of “publishing”, even though the standard form of the article - with links only to previous articles - will remain filed, links to future articles related to it, - and even to some previous ones that may have been overlooked at the writing and refereeing time - will be continously incorporated. Thus electronic journals become dynamic repositories, actually motion documentaries of the research areas they cover.
Recall that it is a well-established practice among some periodicals, like those from ASME[2], to open a space for discussion of their papers, during a fixed period after publication. This also reflects the will to make journals less static. In fact, the same practice was followed some decades ago in China, with the dazibaos. On the other hand, anyone that has written, published, edited, revised no matter which type of article, knows how swiftly mistakes creep in, force their stay, with or without disguises, thus demanding later corrigenda, errata, and so. Links to such updatings will be a more down-to-earth fruit of this dynamical character of new publications. (Let us mention that this strategy is partially already in use since last year by J.UCS[3].)
Arm in arm with the interdisciplinary trend research is following comes the need to access information through previously unsuspected ways, making use of never defined ties. To have more flexible links available, links to be constructed according to the users’ needs, not obeying originators’ vision, becomes mandatory. To accomplish this goal the new media clearly has still unexplored potentialities.
After Gutenberg, information has disseminated more and more quickly, allowing more and more people to get access to human knowledge. Electronic media brings such a dissemination to a pace not dreamed of, even quite recently. Easiness of selecting the information one seeks is a remarkable point, too.
For some time electronic networks were a niche for the science, mainly academic, community. This fact h as led to such an experience of freedom inside the “net” our society constraints would not permit easily, in the open. Thanks to this, many people throughout the world - and even the comercial press - were informed of hidden political facts they would never get to know, were not for the e-mail. Last year, the “bug” discovered at the newly built chip PentiumTM, from Intel Corporation, was disclosed to the whole community at a speed that would not be followed by comercial press, always tied by advertisement contracts and “free response right” laws.
Recently the “net” became open to the wide wild world. Different kinds of worries started to be disclosed, then:
These concerns do reflect a short-sighted view, not considering a new event with a new attitude, thus not grasping all its dimensions. Of course it will take some time to reach every road the new media has opened up. But not too long, for sure.
1 Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia PA 19104, USA
2 Association for Mechanical Engineering
3 J.UCS - The Journal for Universal Computer Science,
Springer-Verlag, Issue 0, Oct. 1994
4 The Web Society, Graz, Austria: Press Release, May 29, 1995;
electronic address: http://info.websoc.at
Carlos A. de Moura, Editor
Responsável do Boletim SBMAC, apresentou esta palestra a convite na 8a.
Conferência da Federação Internacional de Editores Científicos, em Barcelona, julho
1995. O presente texto está sendo incluído com autorização da IFSE, que o publicou em: