Electronic Journals in Biology -- Is it time?

[Don Gilbert]

This has been discussed on bionet in previous years -- check 
thru the wais'ed archives of bionet.  I regard the works that
I publish here (software and discussion) to be published, and
I hope others do also. My job is not a publish or perish one,
so I don't push the topic among those who don't read network news.

My opinion is that the bionet groups + the archives of
software and data (esp. Genbank, EMBL databank, PIR, etc) meet all
the essential criteria of scientific publications, and should be
acceptable fodder for CVs, for citations in other publications, etc.
I counted about 3 or 4 references to my electronically published
software in the recent issue of CABIOS (including one in the
"References" section -- Thanks, Doug Eernisse).  These programs have
never been "published" in any paper journal.

If you write some text, produce data or software with scientific merit,
and place it in a publicly accessible location (network news, archive),
it is published, and you can ask people to treat it as such (see the
dictinary definition of publish).

Network news provides a lot of peer review as well -- if you publish 
something here that others disagree with, everyone will hear about it.

Electronic publishing is here, and has been here for a while, even though 
it may take time for some of the paper-era people to catch on to it.

-- Don
-- 
Don Gilbert                                     gilbert at bio.indiana.edu
biocomputing office, biology dept., indiana univ., bloomington, in 47405