4) Journals are the repository of the greatest amount of data, especially archival journals such as Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables and Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data . Efforts in electronic publishing already may be having a positive impact on the electronic availability of data, but a great utility of this data would be achieved if modern database technology was used to provide appropriate search and retrieval engines to access this data. This also requires the electronic entry of archival issues of journals, a costly enterprise which publishers may not wish to undertake without assurance of at least cost recovery. Furthermore, other implications regarding intellectual property rights, copyright, and potential lose of revenue must be considered.

In addition, data center databases are often composed of recommended or evaluated data sets, and electronic access to the entire history of what has been computed or measured and published in journals would be a tremendous resource. Efforts in the past have relied on first searching for the desired bibliographic references, manually digitizing the data available, and then a process of evaluation by experts. Perhaps publishers could begin to take the role of archiving and labeling for search by simple SQL engines, for example, without bias all data published in their particular journals? The goal would be the preservation in a format that is readily usable without all the human labor intensive steps.