A news story in Science this week (30 August 2002, p. 1468) reports on AGU's transition to electronic publishing; specifically, on issues of page numbering, digital object identifiers (DOIs), pricing, and manuscript backlog. These topics will be familiar to members who have been following AGU's progress in this arena. (To keep members abreast, this transition has been described in an ongoing series of Eos articles that began last year; all have been posted at http://www.agu.org/pubs/pubReports.html) The Science article, which is critical of AGU'S efforts, contains many inaccuracies and serious omissions. AGU members deserve to hear the full story.

Eighty percent of the Science article is focused on the decisions to cease numbering pages sequentially in the print version of AGU journals and to use DOIs for referencing. In the penultimate paragraph, the author of the article also mentions—obliquely—the timeliness of article publication and the resistance of some libraries to the price for electronic access. However, the question of how to paginate and cite AGU journals now that the electronic versions are the journals of record—and related issues—are ones that have been laid to rest for the time being. These issues were first presented to the membership last summer in Eos (31 July 2001). Then, in the spring of this year, at the request of several members, the Publications Committee revisited these topics, and they determined that the chosen course was correct. (See the "About AGU" article by George Hornberger in Eos, 27 August 2002.) At the same time, the latter two issues mentioned by the Science article—timeliness and institutional access to electronic versions of AGU journals—are the current priorities of AGU's journals publishing activities.

Reducing Publication Time

Authors, committees, and headquarters staff have been concentrating on reducing the time from acceptance to publication. The goal is to be faster than the pace of 2001 by the end of 2002. A backlog of manuscripts awaiting publication did build up early this year; and "thin" issues resulted. Currently, however, GRL has exceeded the budgeted number of articles set for this time in the calendar year, and the other journals will have reached that point by year's end. You can follow the progress in improving publication times at http://www.agu.org/pubs/stats/. In addition, staff and committees are making sure that institutions and members understand their options for accessing AGU journals. The philosophy behind AGU's pricing was presented in Eos in the summer of 2001 (10 July 2001); this article is also available on the Web. (Go to http://www.agu.org/pubs/elecPub.html for a guide to all the information on AGU's transition to electronic publishing, from the early strategies presented in 1993, to the current statistics on performance, to the discussions of pricing, format, review and submission, and locating an article.)

Free Access to Electronic Versions

AGU has flexible subscription options that are intended to provide service for institutions and their library clients commensurate with the rates they pay. For example, an Ohio State University librarian was quoted in the Science story as being unable to find an article in an AGU journal to which the library subscribed in print, because the printed version had not yet been published. Yet the librarian would have solved her problem—getting immediate access to the published article—and would not have had to pay one penny extra, if she had taken advantage of the 1-seat in-library license. This in-library access to the electronic version is available free for institutions that have paid for a subscription to the printed journal alone.

Additional Errors and Omissions

In the extended discussion of pagination and DOI in the Science article, there are many errors, omissions, and misleading statements. For example:

  •  The story claims that AGU "backtracked" on its previous decision regarding pagination, by introducing the use of a citation number (see Eos; 13 August 2002).

Wrong. The citation number was in fact introduced only to accommodate the Institute for Scientific Information while they upgrade their systems to make use of DOIs. The use of citation numbers permits ISI, with its present systems, to get an accurate count of the number of times an article is cited.

  •  A diagram accompanying the piece purports to compare the apparent difficulty of dealing with AGU's DOI with the relative ease of the American Physical Society's "smart identifier."

This diagram is wrong. For AGU, it gives most of a journal reference and claims that it is the DOI; for APS, it gives what appears to be a complete DOI and calls it APS's "smart identifier." AGU's DOI is 20 characters (not the 45 characters shown in the diagram) and compares to 18 characters for the APS' DOI. The APS "smart identifier" is 6 digits representing the issue, the disciplinary sub-section within that issue, and the order of publication within the disciplinary sub-section. AGU's citation number, which does not appear in the diagram and without which the citation is not complete, is a 4-digit number assigned at the time of publication; i.e., when an article is posted online. For regular contributions, the citation numbers are sequential throughout the year within a journal or section of JGR. Special issue articles are also numbered sequentially but in different series. The first 8 digits of any DOI are assigned to the publisher by the International DOI Foundation and remain constant. For the unique part of the DOI, AGU uses the article identifier that is assigned on submission. Thus, every author knows what the DOI will be for his or her AGU article, and can use it in citations from the moment of acceptance. With just the DOI, it is easy to get the full citation once an article is published by using online resolvers; certainly an advantage over the old "in press" citations. (AGU's DOI resolver is at http://www.agu.org/pubs/doifind.html)

There is no mention of the fact that many journal publishers are using DOIs, nor does the article point out that both Science and Nature encourage the inclusion of DOIs in citations.

Currently, 6300 journals assign DOIs to their content; 5 million DOIs have been registered to date. About 50 publishers already use the DOI to link citations to the source documents of other publishers. AGU is planning to do the same. It is expected this use of the DOI will increase significantly. Providing the DOI in the citation makes this cross-linking much more efficient.

Finally, of the publishers mentioned in the article, only AGU and the APS have made the electronic version of their journals the version of record. Both societies have dropped sequential page numbers so that there could be a consistent and persistent way to cite an article from the moment of publication.

Science had an opportunity to provide some very interesting insight into what various scientific societies are facing and doing as they make the transition to electronic publication. Instead, they have offered up a long and misleading discussion of a very narrow set of concerns.