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Newsday Visits AIP Publishing CenterPAUL SCHREIBERYOU DON'T OFTEN FIND full-blown equations explicated in the pages of Newsday, so here's one to give you a little flavor of what comes out of another publishing outfit in Melville. 
That little number is from The Journal of Chemical Physics, one of a river of print and online publications that flow out of the publishing division of the American Institute of Physics. The institute, a nonprofit organization based in Maryland, depends on the financial success of its Melville publishing center to support its mission of keeping physicists-and anybody else-on top of matter, energy and their interactions. "Physics is the way the universe works," says Darlene A. Walters, the institute vice president who oversees the Melville publishing center. "The publications allow for the distribution of that information to the community so that it can go on and on and on." Though a low-profile operation, except in the physics universe, the Melville publishing center generated about $52 million for the organization last year by putting out 60 print journals and producing and hosting 95 journals online. By year's end, the publishing division had processed 32,000 technical articles that filled 275,000 pages in 700 journal issues and 45 conference reports. It also posts most of the journals on the Internet, as well as four dozen more for which the publishing center handles only the online end. "The research must continue," Walters says. "The continuation of research is predicated upon the research being available." In part to foster the dissemination of that research, the American Institute of Physics was founded in 1931 to spread "knowledge of the science of physics and its application to human welfare," especially as non-scientists began to fear the fallout, figuratively and literally, of modern technology. The organization became an umbrella under which 10 kindred technical societies-which now have about 130,000 members and include such groups as The American Physical Society, The Society of Rheology, American Astronomical Society and American Association of Physics Teachers-pursue that goal. In 1978, AIP moved from Manhattan to Woodbury and then split off its headquarters to College Park, Md., closer to its member societies and a crucial source of research funding, the federal government. The AIP Publishing Center moved to Melville a year ago, occupying 80,000 square feet of space on two floors in the Huntington Quadrangle. The publishing process begins with the submission of articles by scientists to the scientist-editors of the respective publications. The articles, such as The Journal of Chemical Physics' discussion of "four-dimensional quantum mechanical treatment of penta-atomic systems," are reviewed by other scientists and approved for inclusion. The manuscripts, in typed or digital form, are forwarded to the publishing center for processing. About 100 employees work at home and are connected electronically to the office. Another 300 work in the Melville center, handling as many aspects of the processing, publishing, subscription, distribution and Internet cycle as the member societies are willing to pay for. The journals are printed by publishing houses around the country. The journals range in size from a few hundred pages to about 1,000 pages for The Journal of Mathematical Physics. Subscription prices, determined by the individual societies, range from about $500 a year to several thousand dollars. Subscribers include institutions, such as university and corporate libraries, and individuals. Circulations range from 500 to about 3,000. About a third of the journals carry advertising. Eight of the journals belong to the AIP, but the other 52 and those that want to be available on the Internet are not obligated to use the center's services. That means the AIP Publishing Center must compete with other publishers for the work and with other publications for space. "It's competition in two veins," Walters says. "Libraries only have a certain amount of shelf space and their budgets are minimal, so they're going to go for the journal that is used the most. We also have to worry about competition from other composition vendors. It's not a loosey-goosey kind of thing. Member societies don't have to come to us. If they get a cheaper price down the road, they'll go." In the past five years, Walters says, the institute has invested millions of dollars to create a technologically advanced operation to manage both the print and online aspects. "To be competitive with the scientific, technical, medical publishers-the STM community-we felt we should be on the leading edge." Walters and her associates say the days of the printed page could be numbered. "There's mixed feelings about whether or not print will even be needed or wanted," she says of institutions and subscribers. "They want it in print, but some of them are leaning away from that. Everybody wants it online, too, so we've got both." The publishing center has put great emphasis on its journals-by-Internet venture, called Online Journal Publishing Service and accessible at http://ojps.aip.org. The institute's main site is http://www.aip.org. At the Online Journal site, physicists-and other interested parties-can plumb the Journal of Turbomachinery as easily as the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science & Technology. Abstracts are free. Non-subscribers pay a fee, usually $15 to $25, to download an article. Those who run the AIP Publishing Center believe that the online journals already are outpacing their print counterparts. "We're being visited by 75,000 unique computer addresses every month," says Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development. "That's pretty impressive when there's only 150,000 or 160,000 physicists in the world. We're downloading 500,000 full-text articles a month. That's just an amazing number." Ingoldsby believes the matter of publishing technical information on paper is an equation whose answer will turn out to be zero. "Physicists have this inborn need to share their results in the fastest and widest possible way," he says. "I think it's going to happen. And if it's going to happen, it's probably going to happen first in physics, just because physics has been on the leading edge of this whole thing." Newsday, Inc. 2000. Reprinted with permission. |
