The Internet has changed scientific publishing in many ways, some good and some bad. No one would deny that it is easier to find papers on a particular subject than ever before. Looking up papers in Index Medicus or by browsing Current Contents has long been replaced by online searches on Medline or even Google Scholar. This has not necessarily improved our understanding of the literature, but it certainly provides a quick way to feel up to date.

In some ways, the Internet has even streamlined the submission of manuscripts, although formatting papers correctly still takes an enormous amount of time and the speed of paper review and acceptance doesn’t seem to budge. I still find myself bugging editors after waiting 6–8 weeks with no response—about the same as 20 years ago. Still, overall, I think most scientists feel that the Internet has improved scientific publishing, especially by giving rise to open access journals.

One little-noted casualty of the transition to electronic publishing, however, is the reprint request. Although many authors might bid them good riddance, I sorely miss them because they provided me with one of the best sources of feedback on my scientific research.

For the younger readers, let me explain the concept of reprints and reprint requests. The scientific literature used to be accessed almost completely through journals delivered to libraries. If you found a paper you were interested in reading, usually by scanning article titles in Current Contents or by finding a reference within a paper, you looked it up in the library’s journal collection and made a copy—a slow and cumbersome process. Alternately, you mailed the authors a card requesting a reprint. Indexing services, such as the Institute for Scientific Information, made this process very easy by providing reprint request cards, author addresses, and—eventually—software to print cards.

Requesting and sending reprints was extremely common. After your paper was accepted by a journal, you always ordered lots of reprints, not only to send to grant reviewers and promotion committees, but also to send to fellow scientists. And sending reprint requests to other scientists was a nice way to communicate that you liked their research. Although I usually retrieved papers from the library, I would still ask for reprints from the dozen or so scientists whose work I regularly followed. Although many of my fellow scientists considered reprint requests a big pain, I loved the instant feedback they provided on community interest in my research efforts.

I remember my delight at receiving hundreds of reprint requests for individual papers that I fought long and hard with reviewers to get published. However, I was also surprised to receive only a handful of requests for some papers that I thought were breakthroughs in their field. A quick reality check is always valuable, especially early in your career.

One of the best aspects of feedback from reprint requests was the detailed information it often provided. Requests showed which scientists were interested, their field of study (from their department affiliation), and whether they were following your work over time. Some scientists even included notes. It was also relatively fast. I found that in general, the number of reprint requests for a paper was correlated with eventual citation frequency, but the latter took years to assess. There were also other perks, such as the interesting stamps on requests from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

Nowadays, we don’t bother with reprints—we just download PDFs. Although convenient, this discourages selective reading and almost completely removes the feedback step from the publication process. However, there really is no reason why online journals could not provide this information. Some journals do provide listings of “highly accessed” articles, but I want to consistently know the number of times that my articles are downloaded and the departments and institutions that download them.

Electronic publishing is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of scientific communication, but it is still a nascent medium with much room for improvement. The lack of a rapid feedback mechanism for our papers is still a significant problem. Fortunately, because of the flexibility and dynamic nature of the Internet, it should be relatively easy to fix this. Letting me know how often my articles are downloaded or accessed is one step, although it will not tell me who is doing the downloading. And I will still miss the neat postage stamps.

Steven Wiley is a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Fellow and director of PNNL’s Biomolecular Systems Initiative.

I often ask for e-reprint(and usually receive articles back from Authors)and -much less often- receive requests of my own articles, so little is changed. As in the past, most is done 'in the library', then photocopying and now downloading.
I agree that what e-publishing may really improve as feedback to Authors is to know how many article downloads have been done.
As for 'collecting cards' (I keep them more tha 20 yrs old), I am nostalgic of the beautifully worded multilingual requests which gave the feeling of our worldwide community.

Although getting papers is easy today the present day researchers have missed the joy of getting a reprint from the scientist after sending a reprint request. Getting a paper from a scientist you admire is wonderful and especially if the scientist also took the trouble to pen a few words like "good luck" "hope you find this useful " etc and send the reprint with their signature it was great. I also enjoyed the glossy prints and I guess the trouble one took to send the reprint request and get it made it more valuable and thus thoroughly read.

Dr Wieley is correct although the systems is nostalgic and "fossil" in other's opinions. Reprint request was a matter of pride when received and especially so when the request came from renowned scientist. A combination of electronic communication and reprint request would be beautiful. The postal stamp is still invaluable. While commenting harsher terms like "fossil" may kindly be avoided. Do you become a "fossil" when you leave for the heavenly abode ?

The problem with the new scientific publication Internet-centric scheme is that it's a half-measure that only substituted snail mail with electronic distribution. Previously, the journals would end up laying around university libraries, lounges and offices, and anyone --students and faculty-- would pick them up, get interested, and send a reprint request over the mail.

Nowadays, closed-access publication means that the old serendipitous dissemination does not happen anymore. Only vetted members of closed communities can look up the articles, and they don't lay around anywhere; only when a researcher thinks it might be interesting to another particular person does that article get forwarded. That means less circulation and a less awareness.

If scientific publication would really embrace open access, the tools that are out there would allow direct and immediate feedback with the authors, and within the community itself. RSS feeds, federated search and digg-like community tools could pave the way to awareness, real peer review and instant feedback.

In fact, for many electronically-published articles, the greater casualty is that young potential scientists, the general public, even scientists in other fields and retired scientists may find access to the article denied them. Your casual assumption of downloading a PDF version is based on membership in the working scientific community and access to an academic library.

Very few public libraries subscribe to the large number of scientific journals available today. In fact, science subscription is decreasing is most of today's public libraries as operational costs exceed funding.

In terms of the general population, the working scientific community constitutes an almost invisibly-tiny minority. Yet the general population contains the young people from whom tomorrow's scientists will be drawn; the large number of taxpayers who support basic scientific research; and the elder scientists who may still be mentally active. When young people are denied access to original scientific literature, their only experience of science is from derivative and poorly-written textbooks. And, indeed, we have seen fewer and fewer young people select careers in science. When tax payers are denied access to information about science, they become more and more reluctant to pay for science. And, indeed, we have seen a reduction in Federal support of science since the high point [in constant 2008 dollars] of 1967. When elder scientists are unable to access current scientific research reports, we all lose a valuable viewpoint on the scientific enterprise from a lifetime of research experience.

Now I realize I am commenting in an Open Access Journal, but open access represents a fraction of published research reports. I invite you to explore the references of any current paper, using a computer that does not identify you as a "user", either through membership or through an academic library. Imagine yourself as a young person vitally interested in science; or, as a non-scientist trying to see where the tax money goes. Then look at the cost of such access.

As a young scientist, for a long time I did not understand why people would like to order reprints at high price from the publishers. I guess maybe the reason is people want to keep many single copies in case some peer scientists visit their lab someday and they can present their work conviently.:) Now I realized my guess was wrong, and it is due to the old way people access to the papers they want to read. I feel lucky I am not living in that time! :P

A contributor mentioned that in the past not all interested readers had acess to a university or corporate library.

This still applies with virtual libraries, not only to academics in countries with low GDPs, but also to many retired scientists and those working for medium/small enterprises.

So far, I've never had any email request for a pdf refused or ignored. Since article titles and abstracts are available on line, everything is fine.

What I fear is that someone will produce automatic email writing software that could spam the system out of existence.

Regards

With email addresses on most publications today, it is just as easy, if not easier, than reprint cards for peer-to-peer communication. You can just hop on your email account and send a quick note requesting a reprint and giving actual feedback.

Email is faster, meaning more immediate feedback, and allows for conversation to be initiated. A somewhat anonymous reprint card is less likely to initiate conversation.

I'm a young scientist, 1-year from finishing graduate school so there nostalgia factor isn't there. However, I did receive a reprint card a few months ago (all the way to the US from Europe) and it was pretty neat. A lot of postage and time for what a free email would have taken care of quickly, though.

An anonymous poster said:
"... The journals receive a cut of that profit, but the authors generally do not because they've signed copyright over to the journals. ..."
[Electronic reprint requests - by anonymous poster
[Comment posted 2009-09-01 08:43:54]]

Authors of primary research articles should know that it is increasingly possible to *not* assign all copyright rights to the journals. In many cases, you can instead give them license to publish (edit, print and distribute commercially) thereby retaining your rights to your own work in the long run. Talk to your friendly neighborhood academic or special librarian for help with this.

That said, I don't think you'll make a lot of money this way! But it may allow your work to be more available and thus influential, esp, if you then put it in an open access repository through your institution, or PubMed Central or the like.

This has only limited bearing on the reprint / feedback issue, though. Seems like smart people ought to be able to build a valuable feature like this back into the system. Maybe after the scientific publishing market settles down a bit, this will happen, or maybe smart publishers will do it.

It should be really easy to put in a little bit of code showing number of times a page has been viewed or Pdf downloaded. Now that would be a better indicator than reprint requests... You should be advocating your needs to publishers, and this would be a good venue to ask for public page-view info. Also online comments for manuscripts and 5 star rating systems should be universal in electronically supplied journals.

For those of you waxing nostalgic about reprints (hereafter referred to as "fossils"), be aware that (through the magic of instant Internet information) Mr. Patil (hereafter referred to as "the future") is identified as a Gen Y, 21st century-educated computer network/systems person who is perfectly at home with electronic communication as almost the sole means of contact. From that perspective, a Pentium computer is really old school; a reprint postcard is positively prehistoric.

Remember, "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."

While I also fondly recall the thrill of receiving reprint requests, I think their feedback function is largely reproduced by new article metrics such as DemandFactor, pioneered at the Journal of Vision (journalofvision.org). This is an estimate of the number of readers (pdf downloaders) in the first 1000 days of an article's lifetime. Other journals (PLoS One) are following this lead.

Our author Steven Wiley is absoultely correct! Reprint request (the "old" way) provided a unique feedback mechanism that is no longer available. Even NYTimes publish their "most emailed" or "most blogged" pieces. Reprint requests represented the form of feedback that sharpens your awareness re: possible impact of your work and potential "peers" around the world.

I sympathize with Dr. Wiley. I author a blog about FDA policy at www.fdamatters.com. I struggle to capture data on who reads me, beyond those who have registered for updates. All the solutions I have seen would violate my privacy policy.

Ultimately, it is an act of faith that your writings are well-read, occasionally reinforced by someone sending a note or coming up to you at a meeting. My point: while there are obvious specific barriers within the science community, this is a larger problem that needs to be solved for all authors of material available on the web. Steven

Mr Menon, why you want to complicate things. What is this fashion, endeavors, good, positive interaction, positive feedback.....Want to do speech or science.

It is a great joy to get a paper instantly (anybody, anywhere and anytime). Moreover, using even educators, teachers, students can just download and read the article. They do not have to request for a reprint.

This is exactly what I thought about Patil's comment. If "Retro" is depressing/ unwanted, look up the fashion industry. Science and technology are human endeavors- and those who cannot enjoy good, positive interaction with fellow sceintists , either via reprint requests or positive feedback,could end up unwanted and feeling depressed.

I request to authors for papers directly via email.Most of the cases, I do receive from them within a day.Thanks for the cooperation of our scientific community around the world.

I have (literally) hundreds of PDFs of papers of interest sent by authors. When I come across an interesting article, I simply find an email address for one of the authors and send a 'PDF reprint request'. In 90 percent of cases, the relevant PDF arrives by email the next day - or sometimes only hours or minutes after the request. In some cases, the authors will send a 'galley proof' PDF - a publisher's working draft used before the paper has formally appeared in the journal.

I do not understand this retro thinking. Just imagine waste of resources like time and paper in reprint request system.

Overall I feel such opinions are depressing and unwanted.

I absolutely agree with you giys!

I would never advocate going back to non-internet access to literature, but the request cards made you feel that there was a real scientific community out there for whom your work had meaning. I always pictured the Eastern European requests as coming from a dedicated scientist working on a shoestring budget, and sending a reprint was giving the person access to the wider research of the West. Just another memory to file away with typewritten dissertations on blue-margined paper, and blue diazo 35mm slides for presentations... :)

I absolutely agree. I remember too the thrilling sensation when receiving lots of request cards, meaning that someone out there was interested in my research.

Publishers who provide electronic access to published articles should have statistics about the number of purchases - they have to, if it's pay-per-view, because otherwise they wouldn't know how much to bill for it. But they won't likely make those stats available to authors because that would give the authors an idea of how much money they (the publishers) are making off secondary distribution of the articles. The journals receive a cut of that profit, but the authors generally do not because they've signed copyright over to the journals. I suspect the publishers don't particularly want authors to know the profit margin on secondary distribution. Considering that PDFs have to be generated in order to print, there's very little in the way of overhead for pay-per-view articles.