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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l From: John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 12:10:42 CDT Sender: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET> Message-ID: <9301210219.AA17983@hopf.math.nwu.edu> Subject: What is an electronic journal? Lines: 173

[This contains all 4 parts, concatenated.]

What is an Electronic Journal?

by John Franks Department of Mathematics Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208-2730 john@math.nwu.edu

January 1993

There is considerable enthusiasm among scholars for creating purely electronic journals which can be distributed via the internet. However, in discussing this with colleagues and other interested parties, I find that there are widely varying conceptions, many of them conflicting, of what should constitute an electronic journal. Most scholars, when asked, are supportive of the idea of such a journal. But, often they have only a vague sense of what it should mean -- sometimes little more than the hope that like electronic mail, articles which interest them will magically appear on their desktop computer.

In this article I would like to explore some alternative possibilities for an electronic research journal and comment on the strengths and weaknesses of these alternatives. My focus will be a narrow one -- restricted to a scholarly research periodical, marketed primarily to research libraries. In particular, I want only to address a publication whose authors and editors are unpaid. The addition of royalties paid to author or editor could have a major effect on the issues considered here. Likewise, the electronic publication of a book, even one with a narrow scholarly audience, might entail quite different considerations. Moreover, I want only to address the possibilities for journals distributed via the internet, rather than say, publication in CD-Rom or magnetic tape formats.

WHY DO WE EVEN NEED A JOURNAL?

The first question for an author in the internet arena is why publish, in the traditional sense, at all? Why not simply write articles and make them freely available on the internet to anyone who is interested? After all, there is no direct monetary incentive for the author.

In fact, journals are not an absolute necessity. Making articles freely available via the internet is one way to publish electronically and some authors will choose this method. I would call this form of electronic publishing the ``vanity press model.'' Like all the models of electronic publishing considered here it has some advantages and some disadvantages and we will try to enumerate both.

The Vanity Press Model

First, let's look at the drawbacks, and answer the question why have a journal at all. There are at least three important functions which a journal can provide beyond mere distribution of text.

The first of these is certification. A journal has an editor who chooses a referee or referees to read a submission and attest to its scholarly worthiness. The editor also maintains quality control in non-content areas such as language and presentation (usually with the aid of a copy editor). Different journals have different scholarly standards. This process provides a peer review mechanism for certifying the quality of scholarly work. Academic institutions rely on this process when judging the merits of an individual for promotion or tenure. While an author may have no direct monetary incentive to publish in a journal, the indirect one can be significant.

The second important function is archiving. An author would like to know that twenty or thirty years from now, perhaps after she has retired, her work will still be available to other researchers. Additionally, scholars in the field would like to have an authoritative version of the author's text together with, at least, a definitive date of its creation. Traditionally, archiving is a function not provided by the journal, but by libraries which purchase the journal and maintain its preservation.

The third function which a journal offers is marketing. If I simply write an article and make it available from my personal or departmental computer to anyone on the internet, how will other scholars know of its existence? By contrast, if I publish in a recognized journal, other scholars are much more likely to be aware of my work. This might be because the journal is in their library and they glance at its contents on a regular basis, or because they consult a second order table of contents such as Current Contents.

These three functions, certification, archiving, and marketing constitute the primary value added for the author who publishes in a journal rather than using the ``vanity press'' model. As we discuss other models of electronic publishing we will want to see how well they all perform these author support functions.

It is equally important to ask how well an electronic journal supports subscribers. This is the area where there are the greatest potential advantages over traditional paper journals. Indeed, if an electronic journal is not substantially better or cheaper than a traditional journal, its success will be limited. And if it offers less functionality than a traditional journal it is difficult to see how it will be able to survive in the long run. At an absolute minimum, it must be possible for the subscriber to an electronic journal to print a hard copy of an article of interest, which is of the same quality as a photocopy of an article in a printed journal. Simply viewing an article on a computer screen will not be acceptable, nor will a printed copy in a markup language.

Beyond this minimum, two of the most important criteria by which we should judge different models of electronic publishing are their ease of access and and the quality of their user interface. These are the areas where an electronic format can surpass the functionality of a traditional journal. It might, for example, allow the scholar to browse and search electronically on his desktop computer before printing a copy, on his own printer, for detailed study.

Despite its seeming weakness in the author support functions, the vanity press model does quite well in these scholar support areas. Since the scholar downloads the electronic text to his personal computer, he has complete freedom and flexibility in the choice of how he views it, searches it, or prints it.

Another big plus for the vanity press model is speed. An article can be made available to the scholarly public, literally the instant it is completed. This is such an important asset that many authors already use this model, in addition to publishing in a traditional journal. This practice, of posting an article to a so-called ``preprint data base'' can take different forms. Typically, an author submits an abstract of his work to a moderator who periodically distributes a collection of abstracts, together with information on obtaining the full text of articles, to an electronic mailing list of interested scholars. In all cases of which I am aware, anyone can join the mailing list without charge and there is little or no editorial control by the moderator (i.e. the certification function is not provided). The full text may be kept centrally by the moderator or supplied by the author either through anonymous ftp (see glossary) or, more commonly, by electronic mail.

There are several variants of this process and there will surely be evolutionary changes in the future. Already some groups in physics are making preprints available via gopher (see glossary). This provides a much better mechanism since it provides a number of features not available through the e-mail process. The most important of these include:

* a simpler, easy-to-use user interface * on-line browsing of abstracts or full text, * keyword searching of abstracts or full text, * immediate downloading of desired articles.

If only to meet the need of preprint distribution, the vanity press model of electronic publishing will be with us for the foreseeable future, and its use is likely to expand greatly. There is sufficient interest that the ease of use and functionality of this model will likely continue to improve.

The absence of the marketing function in this model is not as big a problem as it might initially seem. Also its significance as a drawback is diminishing and will continue to do so. The abstract distribution mailing lists and other preprint distribution channels, provide an author with an increasingly effective way to provide electronic visibility for his work. It seems likely that some authors who are indifferent to (or actively resent) the certification function of journals, and are willing to forego the the archiving function, will opt to publish some of their work only via the vanity press model.

It is worth noting, by the way, that the practice described above of ``double publishing,'' -- first electronically, using the vanity press model and then traditionally through an established journal -- may generate some controversy in the near future. Publishers would like the electronic availability of preprints to cease as soon as an article appears. Some publishers, in their copyright transfer agreement, explicitly deny the author the right to make his work available on an electronic data base [1]. I know of no instances of this restriction being enforced, however, and current practice seems to be for electronic versions of articles to be available indefinitely.

WHAT SHOULD A SUBSCRIBER TO AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ACTUALLY GET?

Surprisingly many people who are strong proponents of creating an electronic journal haven't thought a great deal about the answer to this question. Those who have seem to offer a wide array of very divergent answers. More than anything else it is the answer to this question which distinguishes the different models of electronic publishing. As we characterize some of the different visions of what should constitute an electronic journal, it is useful to keep the varying answers to this question in mind.

The Data Base Model

The second model of electronic publishing (and the first which involves what we could really call a journal) is the ``data base model.'' In this model all articles reside on a centralized data base maintained by the publisher and what the subscriber gets is the right to access that data base and probably use search software on the central computer to locate and download articles of interest to him or her. This is roughly the way the commercial data services like Lexis/Nexis or Dialog work.

In practice this might work as follows for the scholar wishing to make use of the journal. The subscription to the journal would be purchased by the library of the scholar's institution. The library would acquire a password allowing access to the journal data base, and would be responsible for protecting it. To use the journal the scholar would typically schedule a time slot with the library and go the library at the appointed time where a librarian who has access to the password would login to the central data base. When the scholar finds an article of interest, it is probable (though not certain) that he would be permitted to make a single hard copy of it for personal use. Because of concern about unauthorized redistribution it is unlikely that the publisher would allow an article to be downloaded in electronic format.

The publisher might only charge the library a fixed annual fee for subscription, but current practice suggests that some publishers are likely to impose additional charges. For example, cost may be a function of the maximum number of simultaneous users. Some publishers will also likely want to charge extra for the use of their search software and perhaps also for connect time. This may not be entirely negative. If the price of a journal depends on the frequency of its use then libraries would have to pay less for access to infrequently used journals. Moreover, publishers of several journals might well offer package deals enabling libraries greater access to journal material at less cost.

How well does this model meet our three author support needs of certification, archiving and marketing? Certification and marketing would likely be quite comparable to a traditional paper journal, but archiving would be dramatically different. Since the library does not maintain a copy of the text, it has no archival function in this model. There are significant trade offs here, which are difficult to evaluate. On the plus side, if a library starts subscribing to such a journal they presumably have immediate access to all past issues (though publishers may want to charge extra for this). On the other hand, if a library cancels its subscription to such a journal it loses its access to all issues including those which appeared during the time it was a subscriber.

More importantly, however, if a publisher should go out of business it is not clear who, if anyone, would assume the archival responsibility. This appears to be a major weakness in the archiving function for this model.

This model is also quite weak in the scholar support criteria: ease of use and quality of user interface. It's functionality is roughly comparable to that of a traditional paper journal and almost identical to a journal which is traditionally marketed but published only on CD-Rom. This model realizes very few of the potential electronic journal advantages, which have sparked the interest of scholars. Most noticeably the scholar must still physically go to the library and with the aid of a librarian produce a copy for personal use (assuming this is possible). In some ways the functionality of this model is less than that of a traditional paper journal.

The Software Model

One of the most miraculous technological achievements of this century is the development of economically important goods which are essentially infinitely reproducible at negligible cost. The miracle of the loaves and fishes pales by comparison to the ease with which anyone with a personal computer can duplicate either software or electronic documents, or someone with a digital tape recorder can duplicate an artistic performance. It must be one of the greatest ironies of our age that this capability is less often viewed as a boon to mankind than as an enormous liability to the publication of music, or software, or even scholarly research. By now we are all familiar with the downside of this technological miracle: unauthorized reproduction of intellectual property deprives its creator of the fruits of his labor. If the creator has no incentive to create he will not do so. (For a fascinating contrarian view of this subject see [2]).

Given the similarities in the nature of this problem for electronic publishing and software publishing, it is not surprising that one vision of an electronic journal seeks to leverage the techniques used in software publishing.

What the subscriber gets in the ``software model'' is a piece of software. It should run on a networked personal computer or workstation and probably be available in the several standard flavors of such devices. Other than the addition of this software this model is quite similar to the data base model. Here's how it might work.

A library or individual subscribes and receives in exchange a floppy disk in the desired flavor. When the software is run on an internet connected computer it connects to the data base on the journal's central computer. The user can then perform searches, download etc., but all downloaded materials will be sent in a proprietary encrypted form which the software can decrypt and display to the user. There is no need for a password, since someone who is not in possession of a currently valid copy of the software cannot decrypt the text. The software might, or might not, allow the user to print a copy of a text document for personal use (it would be technically difficult to allow this while disallowing the creation of an electronic copy of the document). The software would have an expiration date which at each use would be compared with the current date on the central server. The problem of unauthorized access to the journal is reduced to the problem of preventing the unauthorized reproduction of the software (a previously addressed if not totally solved problem).

Since this is really a higher tech version of the data base model it is comparable to that model in meeting the certification, archiving and marketing needs of the author. In particular, it shares the major archiving weakness noted above. On the other hand in terms of functionality for the journal reader it is potentially an improvement. For example, it is possible that the scholar's library could negotiate a site license for the software or perhaps a floating license (see glossary). In this way the software could run on the scholar's personal computer and display text there, even though the only subscription is through the library.

The Subnet Model

The next model of electronic publishing may be the most commonly used commercially as of today, but it is not as yet used for scholarly journals. Instead it is currently used primarily for electronic journalism. Here is an example of how it works.

My university subscribes to a daily news service called ClariNet which provides all UPI syndicated articles. It consists of an enormous amount of material, including not only world, national and regional news (from all regions), but also sports, and columns. There are several hundred newspaper length articles daily. The university is licensed to make this material freely available only to members of the university community.

It is distributed using software which also simultaneously distributes USENET (see glossary) articles. This software, like all client/server software (see glossary), splits the distribution function into two parts. All the text resides on a central server, but a server central to my university -- the archiving function now resides with us. This central server provides the articles via a standard protocol to ``client'' programs running on a variety of platforms. These include networked personal computers and workstations, microcomputers in publicly available labs, and larger computers designed to provide dial up access to electronic mail and other network services for faculty and students. The protocol used is called the Network News Transfer Protocol, (NNTP), and the software for both servers and clients is readily available without cost. Surprisingly, it seems that, on average, this software is of higher quality and better supported than most commercial software.

The restriction that the ClariNet information be distributed only locally is enforced by the server checking the IP address of the computer running the client software. The IP address is that strangely formatted number, like 129.105.123.456, which is associated with a networked computer and provides the basis for routing network traffic. (IP stands for Internet Protocol). This number has a hierarchical structure. For example, all IP addresses at my institution begin with the two triples of digits 129.105. This means the the news server software can simply deny access to any client whose IP address does not begin with this sequence. In other words, the service is offered to anyone on our university ``IP subnet.'' There are a variety of different software ``clients'' for this server. These are software packages designed to run on a particular platform (e.g. Mac or IBM PC). They allow the user to browse the available documents on the server and present selected articles to the user for reading, downloading or printing. It is the responsibility of the client software, not the server, to deal with any display idiosyncrasies of the the user's computer and to take advantage of any of its features.

The license granted my university permits us to archive these documents, but, we do not. Individuals have the right to make copies, electronic or printed, for their personal use. Protection against unauthorized use is afforded by copyright.

The subnet for my university is divided into further subnets by the additional digits in the IP address. For example, appropriately specifying the next three digits designates all those networked computers in my academic department. And, of course, specifying all twelve digits (usually) uniquely determines a single computer. This makes it equally feasible for a publisher to provide access to everyone who has access to a computer on my departmental subnet, or to everyone who has access to an individual computer.

The particular client/server software and the NNTP protocol used for news articles is not appropriate for a scholarly journal, but there are several alternatives which are generally available without cost. In particular, the National Science Foundation has funded the Clearing House for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR), which will develop and support client/server software using the ISO standard protocol for electronic text known as Z39.50 (see glossary). There has also been substantial development of software appropriate for this use by Universities wanting to create campus wide information servers. Most notable in this category is the gopher project.

There are many advantages to a scholarly journal distributed in a way similar to this. The utility to the scholar is much greater when he or she has direct access to documents. This model would rank quite high in the scholar support criteria of ease of access and quality of user interface. If a journal is made available through a standard protocol, the user should have substantial choice about the interface which he uses to view or download the data. I routinely use three different clients to read the UPI news described above, the choice depending on whether I am using my personal computer at home, or a workstation in my office. This kind of flexibility is not likely to be possible with the software or data base models described above.

The mechanism used by gopher or NNTP servers for restricting access to to certain subnets is much simpler than a password scheme and cheaper to implement. It is very much cheaper and simpler to maintain than a model where the publisher must create and support all client software. There are substantial economies for the publisher who uses standard software supported by university computing organizations or organizations like CNIDR. It may seem surprising, but the quality of the client/server software supporting standard protocols and available without cost is much higher than what a publisher is likely to develop and generally of at least as high quality as the average of mass market commercial software. The level of support for such software is commensurately high.

In the subnet model the publishers flexibility in charging is somewhat limited. Subscriptions can be offered to universities, departments, or individuals, but since the text is now archived by someone other than the publisher, it is no longer possible to charge for searching or connect time.

The Subsidized Model

The three electronic journal models described so far, the data base, the software, and the subnet, differ primarily in the extent and method of their efforts to *prevent* the contents of an electronic journal from being read by those who have not paid for it. In the first two of these models the cost of these efforts will represent a substantial fraction of the cost of publishing the journal. It is not inconceivable that the cost of restricting access to the journal will represent a majority of production costs. These costs, of course, will be passed on to the subscriber, but there is another less tangible cost for the subscriber which may be more significant. Experience with the publishing of software has shown that attempts to prevent unauthorized use, make the use much harder for the authorized user. This is true to such an extent that many publishers have abandoned software copy protection, in response to user demand, and rely instead only on the protection afforded by copyright. It is quite possible that the inconvenience resulting from schemes to protect electronic journals will be even more obtrusive than in software publishing. In particular, any scheme which requires the user to physically go to a library and perhaps to enlist the aid of a librarian, or to login and supply a password *each time* a journal is consulted is unlikely to find favor among subscribers.

All this is especially ironic since the authors and editor derive no benefit from the attempts to restrict access. On the contrary, the the best interests of the authors and editor are served by the widest possible distribution (even to non-subscribers).

These considerations lead naturally to the consideration of alternative methods of funding electronic journal production, which would permit free distribution to any interested user. Electronic journals currently in existence are mostly of this type, though, as yet, only a few could be considered true scholarly journals as opposed to newsletters.

A subsidized journal which provides a good example from the point of view of technical production and distribution, is EFFector Online, the newsletter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation [3]. This publication, which appears approximately monthly, is available to any interested party through at least four different electronic protocols. As issues appear they are posted to the USENET system. In addition they are made available for anonymous ftp, they are made available via a gopher server and they are indexed and available to WAIS clients (see glossary). This shotgun approach to distribution meets the subscriber needs of easy access and quality user interface better than any other electronic publication of which I am aware.

Not all of these distribution channels would be appropriate for a scholarly journal, but until such time as a standard emerges for browsing and downloading electronic documents, it is a wise choice to make documents available via a variety of mechanisms. The cost of duplicating distribution protocols is not high, and is far outweighed by the benefits to users.

A second electronic publication worthy of mention in this category is the Ulam Quarterly. This is a refereed mathematics journal provided primarily in an electronic format. Issues of the journal are available by anonymous ftp and are ``offered without charge, courtesy of Palm Beach Atlantic College Mathematics Department with support from the University of Florida.[4]'' This provides an example of a journal in this category where certification is handled in the traditional manner. At present this journal is electronically archived at two sites and marketing is minimal.

Who might underwrite the costs of electronically publishing a journal if there are no subscription revenues? There are a number of possibilities. A professional society might sponsor such a journal and pay for it out of members' dues. Costs might be provided, at least in part, by government grants. A journal might be sponsored by a University, or even a single academic department, as in the case of the Ulam Quarterly. An important factor is that with effectively free distribution via the internet, and the fact that authors and editors are not paid, the cost of producing an electronic journal can be quite modest.

AMONG THESE MODELS WHICH WILL EMERGE AS THE DOMINANT ONE?

This is a difficult question to answer. It is not clear what direction commercial publishers will take. At the moment they seem generally conservative and uninterested in innovating. But, in addition to publishers, two other groups, scholars and librarians, will strongly influence the development of electronic journals.

It is in the interest of scholars, both as producers and consumers of journal articles, to have the widest possible distribution with the fewest encumberances. While a scholar's strongest motivation in selecting a journal for his work will likely be to place it in the most prestigious journal which will accept it, it seems likely that other factors being equal he or she will opt to publish in a subsidized journal where the article's exposure is likely to be greater.

While the interests of librarians may overlap with those of scholars, they do not coincide. A key issue is the state of libraries' readiness and willingness to archive electronic journals. On the one hand librarians have little desire to become computer center managers. On the other hand they understand that if they only license access to information that is owned by a publisher then their role as librarian is diminished. They become little more than a conduit to the publisher for University funds. For a library to own electronic materials it must archive them. This in turn requires computing facilities and new expertise.

It is important to understand that the attitudes of many library staff members towards electronic publishing, or computing in general, are influenced by their experience and expertise with the software and computers they use for Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs). These are typically commercial software systems like NOTIS, which were designed (and often run on computers which were designed) in an era before personal computers and workstations were widely used.

It is likely that among many librarians there is still an expectation that systems like NOTIS and the computers on which they run can be relevant to providing online access to archived electronic journals. In my opinion, there is very little chance that this expectation can be realized. Librarians have already come to realize there traditional OPAC platform cannot provide access to information in CD-Rom format and that to provide this access it is necessary to acquire separate computers and even separate local area networks.

Access to electronic journals, provided using modern protocols, will likewise require new computing facilities and new expertise. It is not completely impossible to provide access using the old software and/or hardware, but it will be much less cost effective to do so. Moreover, the quality of service will be so low that users will find it unacceptable when compared with similar services provided on modern computers. It may be possible to teach an old dog new tricks, but it is very much cheaper to buy a new dog.

Of course libraries will make the transition. But it will likely take time and in the short run libraries will be ill equipped to archive electronic journals and provide their patrons with access to them. This lack is even more dramatic for materials which are more complicated than ASCII text. For example, in mathematics and some sciences, it is very common for journal articles to be created in the TeX text formatting language. The Ulam Quarterly provides its users with articles in two formats -- the TeX ``source'' which is what the author prepares, and the Postscript output which is obtained from processing that source, and is suitable for sending to Postscript capable printers. Almost no libraries today are prepared to deal constructively with TeX source. And relatively few are prepared to handle Postscript on a substantial scale.

All this, may, for the short term, give libraries a reason to prefer the data base or software models described above, because these models will require the least new computer hardware and expertise. On the other hand, there are strong countervailing forces. There is a desire, I think, among librarians to continue their role as archivers. They are likely to be willing to acquire the new skills necessary for this purpose. This argues for an electronic journal model which permits librarians this role. Likewise, current intense budget pressures should make the subsidized model popular among librarians.

This article is, of course, highly speculative. The track record of those who try to predict the course of developments in the use of computers is rather poor. Nevertheless, for those of us thinking about the development of new electronic journals, choices have to be made now. It is my hope that is article can clarify the array of possibilities which lie before us.

GLOSSARY --------

anonymous ftp: (see ftp)

client/server software: Software whose use involves two computers connected on a network -- a ``server'', on which some information physically resides, and a ``client'' which provides a user interface and requests information from the server. The advantage of this scheme is that the server needs no information about the user's interface. The client and server communicate via a specially designed protocol. Thus a single server can communicate with users of many very different kinds of computers without knowing anything about the screen or terminal characteristics of those computers. It is the responsibility of the client (running on the user's computer) to know about the display characteristics of the user's interface and to supply the information in a way compatible with them. See {\it gopher} for an example.

floating license: A client/server mechanism for licensing software for use on computers on a network. If N licenses are purchased for use on a network with many more than N computers, the first N client computers who want to use it are permitted to do so. Subsequent requests are denied until fewer than N copies of the software are in use. This has the advantage of making it possible to use the software on a very large number of computers (though not simultaneously) while purchasing a much smaller number of licenses.

ftp: File transfer protocol. A standard protocol for transferring files between computers on the internet. Normally, it requires the user to have an account on both computers. However, it provides a mechanism called {\it anonymous ftp} which allows the owner of a file on one computer to make it freely available for copying by anyone on the network. Most ftp clients have no capability of viewing or browsing the files they transfer.

gopher: The most widely used electronic information delivery system (not counting USENET which is really a conferencing system) is called Gopher. Initial development on gopher was done at the University of Minnesota (whence its name), but important parts have been developed at Illinois, Indiana, Rice, Stanford, Utah, and elsewhere. Gopher is a client/server based distributed information delivery system. (see {\it client/server}). At present there are gopher clients for the Apple Macintosh, IBM PC, IBM mainframe (CMS), NeXT, Dec VMS, Unix (curses), and X-Windows (including Sun Openwindows). All the client and server software is freely available without cost. A unique feature of this software is the ability to make links from one server to another so it appears to the user that the contents of the second server is a subset of the hierarchy of the first. Currently the NSF and NIH run gopher servers as one means of online access to their public documents. Several hundred colleges and universities use this software as the basis of campus wide information servers.

NNTP: Network News Transfer Protocol -- the protocol used for transferring text on the USENET conferencing system. It has facilities for transmitting text documents between servers and between servers and clients. (see USENET)

USENET: This is a large conferencing system with a distributed data base which exists on literally thousands of ``servers'' world wide. It contains ``articles'' in various ``groups'' organized by subject. There are currently in excess of 2,500 groups. Articles are kept only for a short time (typically 2 weeks) and then discarded, thought some groups are archived. The collection of articles present on a server at any one time can easily exceed a gigabyte (= 1,000 megabytes) of disk space. Groups can be ``moderated'', in which case articles are submitted to an editor who accepts or rejects them for inclusion, or ``unmoderated'' in which case anyone can ``post'' an article to the group. This would be an appropriate mechanism to distribute a newsletter, and is used to distribute the newsletter of the American Physical Society. There are a number of client software programs available for most major platforms.

WAIS: WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Service. It consists of a full text search program utilizing a client/server model. WAIS is complementary to Gopher. It is useful when one wants to do keyword searches through a very large number of documents and then browse those documents with the best matches for the search terms. It also has some built in capability for auditing in order to charge for access. It is based on an older (1988) version of the ISO standard Z39.50 for full text search and retrieval.

Z39.50: An International Standards Organization Standard protocol for full text search and retrieval. Public domain servers and clients using an older version of this protocol are currently available (see WAIS). It is expected that similar software supporting the latest version of the standard will soon be available without cost from the Clearing House for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) which is receiving NSF support to develop it..

REFERENCES

[1] American Math. Soc., Transfer of Copyright Agreement

[2] Richard M. Stallman, The GNU Manifesto, available by anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu/GNUinfo/GNU

[3] EFFector Online, a publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ISSN 1062-9424, available via gopher at gopher.eff.org

[4] Ulam Quarterly announcement on Amer. Math. Soc. gopher at e-math.ams.org port 70

Copyright 1993 by John Franks. Permission is granted to reproduce this article for any purpose provided the source is cited and the author's name and affiliation are not removed.