NOTES SN A TECUMICAL INFORMA TIO SYSTED
Jochua !ederberg
Purposes Of an ideal system and how to get one.

First | ask the nurnoses of a communications system in science--Tukey
hes summarized them nicely as a switching sroblem. How can | netateain
contact with a relevant samole of the community of knowledge? Three aspects:
(1) prompt, detailed and reliable awareness of contributions of other
workers in specialized field of interest (2* contact with broader fields
of scientific advance, oarticularly those peripheral to my own specialized
interests (3) retrieval at my initiative of specific data in the past
archives of recorded knowledqe. A single system will nct need all these
needs.

‘le should not ignore or distort the casuictic aspects of publication.
The responsibility in attaching one's name to an assertion irretrievadly
in print is Indispensable to the integrity of the scientific process. The
opportunity of ''contributing to human knowledge’! formalized in the act of
publication is a motivational foundation stone cf scientific activity. Re-
trieval searches are often impelled by a humanistic obligation to under-

stand science, to display the historical antecederts of new discovery, a

 

perspective that may be more important than the inherent fastructional
value of the prior art. (At least each generation deplores the lack of
this perspective among its own students.)*

The present system has generated two responses: the defeat of neuro-
tic frustration for some, the compromise of narrow specialism for others.
| feel the survivorship of humanistic science demands a better solution.
Nor can technical progress coast indefinitely on the progressive narrow-
ing of fields of interest that is the specialist's practical answer. There
is no-perfect solution, certainly not just retrieval alone. But whet
energies we have could be used more constructively if we could rely on
the system for timely information instead of spending the effort and
anxiety we all do now in fighting it with our own versonal retrieval
systems. As members of a scientific community we have a deeply rooted
obligatior to interact with the "literature. Not so much the size but
the dispersion and formlessness of the institution make this en ever
more hopeless asp#ration. A conventional soiution will be to redefine
the literature! as that part of our scientific legacy t@ which we have
*Citation indexing can mak2 a special contribution here as well as aiding

the search for specific items of fact and new approaches to old orobiems,
routinized aceess, but the still present possibility of foolish rediscovery
will still generate as much uneasiness as our present conceptions of
priority and the personal motivation of discovery will insist.

My suggestions are very simple and not at all original. They incorporate
several of the ideas that Bill Know discussed in ''compacting the literature''--
but | can't agree that we can rely upon self-discipline. Page charges
would be disciplinary influence if the U.S. did not pay them. Now they
work in reverse since an undisciplined author can justify his verbosity
to a journal by Uncle Sem paying for it! We have to create an economic
market which will so far as possible be self-enforcing to achieve gen-
erally desired ends. 1 can best illustrate my proposal by making it
almost too explicit and referring to my own field--equally detailed
corrections may be called for apart from the principles illustrated here.

First let us define, for an initial experiment, a large primary
community of NIH grantees both generators and users of scientific informa-
tion and already heavily subsidized for the efficient prosecution of their
studies.

Proposal for a depository system together with select journals.

1, The National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) should distribute its Index Medicus biweekly to this
community (if you wish read this ''make clear that NIH grant funds are
properly used to purchase such subscriptions'' as they doubtless now are).

2. The NLM should expand and liberalize its ''loan'' services--journals
should not complain of copyright interference when they are eligible for
other forms of implicit subsidy. These procedures will further help to
fix the NLM as a central information nexus in the health sciences.

3. The NLM should announce thet it will act as a depository for
scientific manuscripts from this community. These manuscripts can range
from brief technical reports such as might now be submitted to Current
Biophysical Communications to carefully written, lengthy and thoughtful
reviews.

4, By analogy with ASTIA, NLM will announce titles (with or without
abstracts? promptly in the Index Medicus and distribute copies on request
to this community. The depository materials will also be used for in-
tensive experiments in deep indexing, citation indexing, etc. insuring

the widest penetration of retrieval operations into the collection.
NLM would also establish regional and international repositories at which
copies would be available for local scrutiny. There are obvious fubther
possibilities for data links.

>. The ground rules of the depository would include

a. Prompt acceptance and distribution of papers from the community
on proviso of critical review of two other members of the same community.
Some page or article limitation may be available on the discretion of the
accepting office.

b. No paper may be withdrawn once deposited--as with journal
publications the author's reputation is permanently attached to it. The
author, of course, may submit amendations, corrections, etc., to be attached
to a previous submission. The possibility of doing this is already a
substantial advantage over present publication means.

c. Deposits would in general not be reviewed centrally in order
to speed the availability of the papers to the community. However, if
abuses become evident, the NLM office might have the discretion to
abbreviate the title and abstract of, say, the third and subsequent
contributions each year from a given author to ''Contribution No, my
This kind of procedure on the one hand insures that no contribution is
ever entirely excluded from the archives, and on the other allows for
some degree of discretion in taking abstracting time, and space to broad-
cast news of a deposit.

d. The author might certify to having read editorial suggestions
on format and non-redundancy; in due course he might also be asked to
submit descriptors or citations on prepared punch cards to facilitate
data processing. Sequential papers should be written as addende to
previous ones insofar as requestors can always obtain these concomitantly
and abstracts will indicate the connections.

e. Authors will attach ''MD No, '' to their own reprints,
taking place of the preprint system. But unlike informal preprints,
authors will be formally responsible for them as equivalent to publication
and may be quoted or criticized in the corresponding literature.

Ff. Authors may also submit the same articles to journals to be
published at the journals! discretion. Author or editor may annotate
the MD Noi article to indicate such publication and also to indicate

any critical amendations. | 1 an article is accented in a journal of wide
4

currency the NLM might temporarily suspend its own distribution of coptes

if this is required for reasons of economy. |

g. An updated citation i:dex might be attached to each MD for
subsequent distribution; in any case this could be routinely furnished
to the author if not comprehensively published.

6. Positive role of depository plan

a. Prompt and widespread availability and indexing service should
make this an attractive vehicle for publication of contemnorary firdings
in a timely but resvonsible form, Much of scientific advance-ts secuenttia!
and the importance of prompt information to accelerate rew discovery and
minimize unnecessary duplication is not widely enough understood. That
contributions can take a full year to come out [In print is an absurdity
of modern science. The central denository would facilitate retrieval
operations. {ft would also discourage the redundancy imelicit in perinoheral
publication end the irresponsibility of gossiz and "invisible colleges''.
The connection of NUM with granting functions should further encourage
the use of the system especially insofar as the deovosits vould do mltinle
duty as project rerorts (and otherwise obviously facilitate ''scientific
inte! ligence! within NIH).

b. The depository would also facilitate the publication of ex-=
nensive archival documents--e,g.taxonomies--which may be of critical
importance but have too JimnFex a circulation to justify journal or
book publication.

c. Authors prerogatives or abuses? Will the system be abused
if depositio:. is so readily available? The same fact destroys ‘much of
the motive for abuse--there is no implied prestige in the deposit of n
pieces of paper which have nassed no hurdles, and there is negligible waste

Meanwhile a substantial load can
if they are not broadcast, only listed by title. be ftueen off the jeurnals.
7. The depository ard its retrieval system will meet indicated reeds
where the user must take the initiative--needs which journals fill in

the most chaotic way: current awareness and archival retrievel. But

Fe pe nepeann ga sas NGM cre at I AH E

 

tr nmesnagn eet

the journals continue to play a critical role in scientific culture--
they are broedsides on which | would rely to bring me unasked the best

or overtly most interesting of contemporary science. The journals should
‘revert to being select journals. They shoufd be few enough thet | can
hope to scan the ones nearest my own field. They should stress reviews

and commentaries (facilitated by hetter retrieval) that will help guide
An

me through the literature and find new connections through it. They should
discourage useless redundancy. They should be légitimate sources of crestige.
They should be attractively and durably produced. Cne useful Journal! would
be exalicitly chosen as a periodat reports-reprirt. series in various fiellds.

. Present journals do not meet these criteria wt hoppy secon viens the sFusbn is

the jovsnals atleast murenumerous - *

worse, The depository system may, however, take much of the moral pressure
from them, especially those published by societies. And other constructive
measures--through the details of inevitable federal subsidy=-can he elaborated.
{| would prefer to see the overall level of journel output boiled dowr to
about 19 ver cent of its present level where | could start to cope with
it. At least its further exponential growth=--much of it somewhat cynically
motivated to exploit present confuston--should be frozen immediately. This
in itself, together with comoetition from the repositories, should gradually
upgrade the journals to be ''select journals'' or at least whatever the
readershiz wants them to be. The scientific societies should be especially
sensitive to fulfill the requirements of their members under this definition
of journal publication.

8. Economic impact on journals. The federal government is already in-
extricably involved in the economics of journal publication, if only through
its massive support of research, and through indirect payment for advertising
and through various hidden as well as overt subsidies. !t can hardly
withdraw from the fields it should recognize and rationalize its responsibilities.
Government obviously can have no direct negative impact on journals 5y
suppression--but it can favor the most useful patterns (a) through the
competition of sources and readership and fb) financial subsidies for the
qualified journals.

ideally, a journal should be judged in ia'matrket of scientific reader-
shin, its own subscribers. The page charge Is a subsidy levied at the
wrong end and particularly hard to justify im parallel with @ depository
system. It should be revoked in favor of subsidy to subscribers, nanely
the grantee community, to facilitate their choice of and influence on
the journals meeting their own needs. As a mechanism, say, * per cent
of grant funds might be automatically available for the purchase of
such communications at economic prices.

New profit-making journals pose a difficult problem. If authors

<unaccountably) continue to contribute to them, libraries are black-
mailed into buying them almost whatever the price and the vicious cycle
begins. One solution is that authors receiving the community services

be urged or obliged to agree to submit their contributions to the despository
as well where they remain potentially available even if not in so slick

a form, The NLM can also get around this by more direct redistribution

of the printed papers. There may be copyright problems but they are not
insoluble insofar as each grantee has a direct obligation to his

scientific colleagues, If they are insoluble under present law we may

have to recommend new lecislation.

ELM also has the leverage of what it chooses to index and thereby
make retrievable. Journals that consist mainly of advertising shoul4
hardly qualify for this form of notice and hy this convention will be
“outside the literature’. Individual worthwhile items can still be
recouped by deposition.

9. Extentions. The NLM-NIH community is a larce group but still con-
Fined enouch to nurture such an experiment. Of course it cannot remain
a closed group. The questions of extension are mainly secondary ones cf
financial policy. The main point is to establish whether the services
are useful ones in relation to the costs of the system. Financial policy
then becomes a useful tool for the allocation of the services. If the
experiment is successful it is bound to spill over into other areas of
science. But the present needs are perhaps most acute in biology and
medicine.

10, Centralization. 1 am not an advocate of centralization for its
own sake, but | prefer it to chaos. Many of the services implied here
should be delegated to professional societies in those disciplines
fortunate enough to have sufficient organizations. But the government

must see that the job is done across the board and the holes pluqced
one way or another.

The ACS is already initiating a preprint service for Industria} and
Engineering Chemi stry--(why this journal, mot JACS? | hone the scale
and institutional support of the project #s such as to give the scheme
a fair test).

Il. International implications. Our loose program of SIS is no hel>

in trying to organize services and cooperations on an international basis.
A health sciences repository would be a very useful contribution to
establisk technical aqood will in other countries es AEC has already done.

We should ao far beyond NLM in this, but ft would be a good next sten.
Conclusion. The intended result of these plans would be 2a dual communi-
cation system. A centralized repository would provide the range of materials

that | would soecify as being required for my immediate and retrospective
information requirements. Concurrently, select fournals with hich standards
of selection and editorial quality would maintain my contact with the
breadth of scientific culture. Practical means ere proposed for este lish-

ing such a system on a competitive basis with a minimum of central duress.