Vision of the Future

The Vision at the Wave of the Future

Wave of the Future provided on-line peer-review of preprint manuscripts on a web page as part of a vision of a new scientific publication system, comprising a large number of computer servers linked logically by search engines, with each server storing years of quality articles, graphics, and data from a handful of researchers in similar fields for easy retrieval. This concept caught on first in the field of physics, and then in chemistry through systems like ChemWeb.com

Many complaints are often heard about the scientific literature. Readers complain that journals are bulky and that it is hard to find exactly what they want to find (but WWW articles can be found quickly and accurately using appropriate search engines). Libraries complain that journal subscriptions are too expensive and that the paper copies are difficult to store (but online peer review of digital copies of manuscripts lowers costs of publication and storage). Authors claim that it takes too long to get an article published (but posting of articles can be instantaneous on the WWW), there is not enough page space available (but available space is limited only by the computing hardware on the WWW, which grows exponentially), page charges are too high (but it is possible to get free publication on existing machines on the WWW), and anonymous peer review does not allow readers or authors to gauge the quality of the review process (but all reviews can be signed and published along with the article, just as practiced in the statistics literature, for example). With this on-line peer-review format, and funding from our sponsors, Wave of the Future addressed these problems on an experimental basis. The approach was so successful that it was adopted by the national laboratories and commercial enterprises like ChemWeb.com.

Comments were invited on all of the manuscripts provided in the Wave of the Future. All comments were posted with the others received, along with the reviewer's name and email address in the page following the manuscript, just like on the preprint server operated on ChemWeb. Authors were encouraged to respond to comments in the same way, making all of the information available in a package for readers to judge the merits of all sides of the issues presented. To see the results, readers needed only to point their Web browsers at the Wave of the Future.

The Wave of the Future was used as a feeder for other paper journals. Editors selected papers from the Wave for print dissemination based on peer review comments and number of accesses as an indication of reader interest, thus increasing the quality of the papers they spent money on publishing as hard copy. Papers were actually perfected first on the Web as a result of comments received. This approach seems likely to continue on preprint servers like ChemWeb.com.

In the future, scientific WWW publication seems likely to increase. Journals may eventually cut the number of pages they print to zero, go to all Web publication (or whatever on-line equivalent replaces the Web) and move their ads to the WWW servers. Until then, filling the journals with papers that review well and attract a lot of reader interest can only increase their readership and advertising revenue. We invite you to participate in this new wave of the future by preprinting your manuscript on ChemWeb.com.