Wednesday I co-presented with Allan Cho on mashups in the biomedical library communities at the Association of American Publishers 2009 PSP Pre-Conference. I also had the fortune to sit in and listen to a variety of interesting other presentations. One of the neatest presentations I listened to was on Interactive Science Publishing.
What is Interactive Science Publishing? Think of it as the PDF on steroids. Currently traditional PDF articles aren't that different from the print. It may have links within the article (example: links to articles in the refrence section) but in general it is the same ol' article.

Enter the interactive article.
Imagine having the "PDF" of an article on congenital heart defects and be able to hear the heart sounds plus the video recording of the heart. The video would be more than just a snippet, it would be the entire video sectioned into "chapters" refrenced within the various areas of the article. So while you are reading the article you can click on the link within the text referencing the image, sound, etc. and the image immediately jumps to that section the video. Imagine the data behind a large randomized control trial available in its entirety to all readers to be manpulated, reused, and viewed.


Two different people presented on this new online journal structure. The first person, George Thoma, described the program they created which was one of ten semi-finalists in Elsevier's Article 2.0 contest. The second person John Childs, spoke of OSA's product which was developed in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine. Both products were very similar and very impressive. Currently you must download OSA's free software to view their interactive journals. The have already published several articles in this fashion in OSA journals currently indexed in MEDLINE. If you can't download and install software at your work computer, it is definitely worth trying at home just to get an idea of the all the possibilities and ways an article (and all the data, video, images, etc. behind it) can be viewed and used by readers.


While this type of interactive article is still a little ways away, it is jaw dropping at how the simple paper article can and will become so much more in the future. With all of the possibilities and opportunities this type of article presents, there still some questions to be answered.


There probably needs to be one standard for this new technology to become adopted. Readers are not going to want to download one type of reader to view one publisher's articles and another reader for a different publisher's articles. This is equally true for the submission of articles. Authors are not going to want to try and use multiple programs to submit their articles, data, and images. Changes regarding data sharing also must occur within the biomedical community. In the physics and mathmatical science world, researchers frequently share their data and use other people's data. Not so in the biomedical world, researchers closely guard their data because it is the ticket to their next grant funding. Sharing of biomedical research data would not only help research to grow at a faster and more productive pace, it will also help find those fraudulent researchers who expertly fake their data and publish their results in well know journals like Lancet. Having the data available for the world to look at and go through opens the research to another level of vetting that the actual peer reviewers might not catch.

Libraries and library vendors also have quite a few issues to think about and deal with regarding these new interactive articles. First, how will interlibrary loan work? There will be so much important information within the article that is digital and not available by traditional PDF means, how will that information be shared. A researchers getting just the PDF without the data behind the article would be like getting an article with a few pages missing. How will full text database providers deal with the interactive article within their database? Will they have rights to the videos and data sets? How will they build whatever interactive article software viewer that becomes the standard into their database? Would they need to?

Another big question (one many librarians don't like to talk about) is, what are the implications to the printed journal? I used to think that the printed journal would still be around in some way and the libraries would always get the printed journal. That trend is already beginning to change with just the average vanilla electronic journal. Libraries more and more are dumping printed journals in favor of online access and online repositories. The interactive journal article would speed this process up considerably. A related question would be what would be the institutional subscription vs. personal subscription access implications. There are publishers who give personal subscribers different and more inclusive access to information compared to what institutional subscribers are allowed to access. Would things like all of the research data in the interactive article be only available to personal subscribers?

The interactive article is still too far in the future for any immediate answers, but these questions and others are ones that will need to be addressed, because technology has made it possible for this kind of journal article to exist. It is only a matter of time before it or something like it becomes a reality.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology