On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Robert J. Palmer Jr.
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 1) does anyone actually read paper journals?  One can lament or applaud the
> trend towards "electronic only" but it is unstoppable and makes some of this
> discussion irrelevant.

I have to say that 99.9% of the papers I read are PDFs I view on my
monitor.  Occasionally I will print one out if I want to show it to
somebody else, but I usually just forward it via email.  That said, it
is odd that I am viewing an image downsampled in a PDF.  I think it is
worthwhile to have a downsampled 'thumbnail' or 'preview' image in an
electronic paper to keep the file size easily emailed/portable.
However, I think critical images should be hotlinked to the original
data.  That way I could click on the placeholder/thumbnail image and
get the raw data to make my own assessment against the author's
claims.  The tricky part would be to have a static location to store
the raw data so that the links in the PDF stay good.  Also, the reader
would have to have an appropriate application to open the data, so
something free and common, like Fiji/ImageJ would be required.

Craig