Forwarded from VPIEJ-L.    --Birdie

------------------------------Original Message-----------------------------
Date:         Mon, 17 May 1993 11:29:37 EDT
Sender:       "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
              and Access" <VPIEJ-L@VTVM1.BITNET>
From:         Lon Savage <SAVAGE@VTVM1.BITNET>

NEWS RELEASE
May 17, 1993
              JOURNAL OF FLUIDS ENGINEERING OFFERS
                  RESEARCH DATA ELECTRONICALLY

     The Journal of Fluids Engineering, published by The American
Society of Mechanical Engineers, has begun offering its readers
the opportunity to obtain electronic files, via the Internet, of
the full data on which some of its published research papers are
based.  It appears that many readers already are using the
service.

     In its two most recent issues (December 1992 and March
1993), the Journal has published a total of five research papers
accompanied by extensive research data -- far too voluminous to
be included in the print journal; the data are archived
electronically in the Newman Library at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University and available via the Internet as
electronic files.  Readers are advised, through notes
accompanying each article and instructions at the back of each
journal issue, how they can retrieve the files electronically via
File Transfer Protocol (ftp).

     The service was initiated on an experimental basis through
the cooperation of the Scholarly Communications Project at
Virginia Tech, which publishes several electronic journals, and
the University Libraries, which contributed the storage space.

     Demetri P. Telionis, Professor of Engineering Science and
Mechanics at Virginia Tech and technical editor of the journal,
in introducing the service to his readers, wrote that the need
for such a data bank "arose naturally with the flood of
experimental data that modern experimental methods can produce.
Authors are often forced to select an example of their more
representative data to include in the figures of their paper.
This is often adequate to convey the basic message of their
findings.  However, researchers working on the same topic,
experimentalists or numerical analysis may need the entire set of
data to compare with their own results."

     In addition, Telionis wrote, "It is more convenient and more
accurate to have the exact digital data in a file rather than
trying to obtain such information manually from a scaled-down
figure" as it appears in a print journal.

     The journal's data bank, Telionis wrote, "was organized in
the spirit of an archival scientific journal...as a natural
extension of scientific archiving."  Data accompanying a paper
Fluids Engineering News Release "must be reviewed and deemed
significant to the engineering community.  These data are then
archived and remain in the bank for posterity in standard form.
This information is contributed to open literature and is
therefore available to all readers."

     Early indications are that readers are using the service.
More than 1,500 files were retrieved from the electronic archive
during April, 1993, according to James Powell, Technical Director
of the Project, and well over half of those files were data sets.
The retrievals came from more than thirty sites, including sites
in Germany, Singapore, Taiwan, Chile, Canada and the United
States, Powell said.  Most appeared to be from university sites,
he added.