A more rational approach in dealing with scientific information is required. That means, all relevant documents should be available in an electronic format, perhaps SGML, that contains sufficient markup to allow for an automatic generation of the document formats requested by the user: high-quality print, online hypertext, excerpts for use in data bases etc.
The current waste of time (and money) caused by media breaks, manual reformatting, manual preparation of excerpts or even re-typing of text and re-drawing of structural formulas must be avoided. Since many scientists prefer a WYSIWYG approach to directly generating SGML by editing a plain ASCII file, the corresponding tools will have to be developed or improved.
Online version of this paper, URL:
http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemistry/papers/cic96/