Multiple use and other benefits of computerized publishing

Typesetting of journals by computer still is more expensive today than typewriter composition. Economics favors the computer only if multiple use can be made of the material after it has been captured in machine-readable form. Such is the case with the material that is keyboarded into the bibliographic database of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The records in tins database are produced directly from the manuscripts submitted by authors and are then used over and over again: to photocompose a part of the article in the primary journal itself, to photocompose pages for an “advance abstracts” publication, to photocompose selected abstracts needed by The Energy Research and Development Administration's (ERDA's) Nuclear Science Abstracts and to provide ERDA with a corresponding tape which eventually goes to the International Nuclear Information System in Vienna, to produce a monthly tape for information centers offering selective dissemination of information (SDI) and other services, to produce multiple entries in the new quarterly Current Physics Index which covers all the physics journals published by AIP, to produce multiple entries in the annual subject and author indexes in each journal, and to produce cumulative 5 to 20-year journal indexes. The multiple-use concept cannot be used to justify computer typesetting of the full text of journal articles. We will specify the conditions that must be met before full-text computer composition can become competitive with other methods, and discuss some of the advantages of such a system.