Publishing New Zealand Science on CD-ROM: an Action Research Approach

Abstract

This thesis is submitted in electronic form as well as in traditional ink-on-paper format. The aim is to demonstrate a potentially enhanced type of primary scientific publication. Prototype electronic publications were developed by action research, through several iterative cycles (planning, action, observation, and reflection) of increasing scope and dimension. Reviews of the literature concerning contemporary scientific publication, an overview of relevant information technology, and a case history of the New Zealand science publishing industry, place the experimentation in an international, technological, and national context. The core of this thesis reports on how one issue of the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research (NZJMFR) was developed for publication in electronic form in 1990. After evaluating Guide hypertext and Romware authoring software, the latter was selected for database building and retrieval. Floppy disk was the initial distributed storage medium of the prototype "100 Rivers on Disk". This underwent user evaluation within and outside New Zealand in 1991, by means of a self-selected sample of c. 100 scientists and librarians. Respondents expressed doubt about universal access to the information, a preference for hardcopy over screens to work from, difficulty with the applied version of the software, and disappointment with the low-resolution graphics. They clearly indicated that electronic publication was desirable to supplement but not replace ink-on-paper journals. Questionnaire responses were applied towards the subsequent development of the first New Zealand-authored CD-ROM publication, "Samples of New Zealand Science on CD-ROM". This material includes in Romware database format: another collection of NZJMFR articles; an abstracts database; a bibliographic database; and the thesis itself with research documentation, i.e., the prototype "100 Rivers" and user responses to it. The thesis suggests an improved layout and structure of full-text electronic publications; proposes a system for improving the accuracy of bibliographic references; includes raw research data that can be manipulated and exported; and shows how traditional-style scientific articles, prepared by desktop publishing, can be downloaded direct from disc to suitable laser printers. Delivery of journal pages with formatted text, tables and figures could thus by-pass the ink-on-paper printing stage. The concept of Pacific Scientific is proposed as a new international scientific publication, that reconciles searchable CD-ROM and on-line databases with delivering traditional-style offprints.