What is the advantage of electronic publishing for our heroic foot-soldier?
RAPID and COMPLETE scanning of the literature would not only help one keep abreast of the literature, but also would ease the pressure to publish in the few journals that people actually read (Science, Nature, PRL). Papers could be quickly down-loaded and printed (WITH HIGH RESOLUTION 600 DPI GRAPHICS) to spare time spent trying to track down papers and xerox them. High resolution image files and appendixes with large amounts of experimental details would make papers much more useful. Cores of the paper would be readily available, with options (as in a Hypertext environment) for detail IF DESIRED. I am not sure however how much the electronic publishing community realizes how much data is involved in high-resolution graphics. I showed about 1 minute of video footage of DNA moving in a maze. Since the image quality must be high to see the molecules, a minimum of 250 kilobytes of binary data per frame is necessary, 250 kbytes of binary data turns into an ASCII Postscript file of about 2.
