| Description | Letter from Mr Balfour Browne, secretary to the meeting of the 77 British Zoologists who met in the rooms of the Zoological Society of London and passed a resolution to be forwarded to Sir David Parain, President of the Royal Society Committee for the consideration of the American Scheme for the publication of Biological Abstracts.
' This meeting of British Zoologists is of opinion that it is in the highest degree desirable that an effort should be made to extend the system of publishing comprehensive abstracts of zoological literture, and we desire to place on record our great appreciation of the work that has been done, to this end by the American Committee for "Biological Abstracts". We are, however, also of the oopinion that the scheme that has recently been submitted for out approval is open to serious objection in various directions. Only some of these need here be mentioned;-
1. The magnitude of the work involved appears to have been under-estimated
2. The financial arrangements so far made public are obviously quite inadequate for the purpose, which is a most serious point; it would be folly to assume that any publication of abstracts in pure science can be made self-supporting, and no scheme of this kind should be put into operation until satisfactory arrangements have been made for some permanent endowment.
3. The proposal to publish the abstracts of the whole of biological literature in a single journal is unsatisfactory ; such a journal would be extremely cumbersome and highly inconvenient for all classes of workers. Bearing in mind the probable great increase of literature in the future, a much sounder plan would be to institute separate journals dealing with convenient sections of scientific work.
4. The abstracts will be very much shorter than those now being published in this country, and this brevity will seriously detract from their value to most workers.
5. The estimates for indexing are entirely inadequate.
6. No provision has been made for the utilisation or co-ordination of the various biological abstracting organisations that already exist in this country and deal adequately with several branches of science; apparently it is proposed to reduplicate their work, but in a less useful form.
In the circumstances we consider that this scheme requires drastic revision. ' |