This page covers scholarly electronic publishing.

     overviews

We've mentioned Richard Ekman & Quandt's Technology & Scholarly Communication (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 99), Kahin & Varian's Internet Publishing & Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information & Intellectual Property (Cambridge, MIT Press 00) and Robin Peek's Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MIT Press 96). 

Ekman and Richard Quandt (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 99) is the print version of the major 1997 conference under the auspices of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. It was complemented by a conference on The Specialized Scholarly Monograph In Crisis - How Do I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book (SSMC) under the auspices of the Association of Research Libraries. 

A concise response is provided in To Publish Or Perish, a 1998 Pew Symposium and other resources identified by the US Association of Research Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) and updated by the 1999 follow-up conference on New Challenges for Scholarly Communication in the Digital Era.  

A European perspective appears in The Impact of Electronic Publishing on the Academic Community, the proceedings of a 1997 workshop organized by Academia Europaea and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell edited the interesting - if sometimes overly idiosyncratic - Scholarly Communications At The Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal For Electronic Publishing (SCC). O'Donnell is the author of the excellent Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 98). 

Okerson's 1997 paper A Librarian's (Quick) View of Doing Business for Electronic Information; with thoughts about roles, relationships, issues is also worth reading and is more readily available. 

Among government studies we recommend The Publishing of Electronic Scholarly Monographs & Textbooks, a detailed 1998 report by Christopher Armstrong & Ray Lonsdale for the UK Online Library Network. Scholarly Electronic Publishing In The Sciences & Humanities, a report from the University of Calgary, is significant for its examination of user responses to electronic publication.

Locally there's disappointingly little significant writing, once the hype is discounted.  The Electronic Publishing Working Group of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) produced a set of reports - somewhat inward-looking - on Key Issues in Australian Electronic Publishing during 1995-96 and the National Scholarly Communications Forum has held a number of symposia, notably that in 1996 on The Future of Academic Publishing (FAP). 

There's more substance in The Changing World of Scholarly Communication: Challenges & Choices for Canada, the final report of the AUCC-CARL/ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries & Scholarly Communication and Beyond Print: Scholarly Publishing & Communication in the Electronic Environment, the 1997 symposium at the University of Toronto.

In March 2000 the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries articulated Principles For Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing. They are complemented by Peter Noerr's Digital Library Tool Kit paper - a primer for development, management and distribution of digital content - and the Digital Library Standards from the Berkely SunSite.

The next part of this guide highlights writings about costing and pricing academic electronic publications. It also points to material on licensing issues; the separate intellectual property guide and associated profiles consider particular licensing questions and proposals for streamlined rights clearance within academic institutions or for the mass market.

Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography online - recently updated - provides an outstanding introduction to North American research into academic EP. The University of California maintains the New Horizons in Scholarly Communication (NH) site. The Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network (CESN) site provides information on academic e- publishing initiatives, notably the Electronic Scholarly Publishing Promotion Project (ESP3).

The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) and the digital library journals Ariadne and Dlib are excellent value.

     monographs

We'll shortly be examining some of the Australian and overseas scholarly monograph e-publishing initiatives. 

Andrew Odlyzko echoed Michael Leask, author of Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes & Bucks (San Francisco, Morgan Kaufmann 97), in noting that

the costs of just the buildings of the new British Library in London and the new French National Library in Paris are two or three times higher than the costs of converting their book collections to a digital format. In a more rational world, the money going into bricks and mortar would have gone into scanning the books, which would have provided much more rapid and convenient access to the data for scholars. The physical volumes themselves could be housed in cheap warehouses, for the rare occasions when they might have to be consulted. However, user resistance to new media, copyright constraints, and the politicians' and the public's liking for visible edifices and for solid books make it hard to take that step.

.... the entire mathematical literature collected over the centuries is perhaps 30 million pages, so digitizing it at a cost of $0.60 per page would cost $18 million, less than ten percent of the annual journal bill

One of the more interesting projects is the HistoryE-book project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation (sponsors of the scholarly electronic publishing conferences noted later in this guide), it aims to provide electronic access - online, in CD-ROM and other digital formats - to the back catalogue of US scholarly presses.  

It is taking place in conjunction with the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e Prizes project, that will provide electronic access to new historical monographs.  Both projects have been animated by Robert Darnton, whose perspective on electronic publishing is supplied in his recent essay A Historian of Books, Lost & Found in Cyberspace. We described both projects in the 1 July issue of Analysphere.

Among procedural and background studies we recommend An Architecture for Scholarly Publishing on the World Wide Web, the 1995 paper by Stuart Weibel, Eric Miller, Jean Godby & Ralph LeVan of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) - inventors of the Dublin Core metadata set - and Electronic Publishing Programs: Issues to Consider, a 1996 paper by Elizabeth Brown & Andrea Duda. Anat Hovav's 1997 paper Academic Electronic Publishing: Scenarios for 2007, considers possible futures.

     serials

The May 1997 issue of the online Newsletter on Serials Pricing (NSP) featured Ken Rouse's article on The Serials Crisis In The Age of Electronic Access, arguing that institutions and individuals could not keep pace with the increasing cost of professional journals, whether online or in print. Recent updates suggest the situation hasn't improved. As a result there's increasing attention to suggestions for a new publishing framework. 

Andrew Odlyzko, in a  paper (PDF) for The Transition from Paper: A Vision of Scientific Communication in 2020  (London, Springer 00) was characteristically incisive in noting that

the entire mathematical literature collected over the centuries is perhaps 30 million pages, so digitizing it at a cost of $0.60 per page would cost $18 million, less than ten percent of the annual journal bill

Robert Kling's 1995 introduction Controversies About Electronic Journals & Scholarly Communication retains its value. Kling coauthored the report Analyzing Visions of Electronic Publishing & Digital Libraries.

In the mid 1990's Hal Varian argued that the economics driving e-publishing necessitated changes in the form of the scholarly journal. Tom Wilson's 1995 paper on Social & Economic Factors in Scholarly Electronic Communication and Electronic Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Citation and Reference Study, a paper by Steven Harter & Hak Kim, endorsed that argument. 

In the UK Judith Edwards wrote in the 1997 Ariadne on Electronic Journals: Problems or panacea?, while Bernard Hibbitts of the University of Pittsburgh questioned whether it was Last Writes?: Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace. 

As an attitudinal study Philip McEldowney's 1995 masters thesis on Scholarly Electronic Journals: Trends & Academic Attitudes is becoming dated but is of interest. Andrew Treloar's 1999 doctoral thesis on Hypermedia Scholarly Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal (PDF) is substantial and backgrounds his Are E-Journals a new genre, or an old genre in a new medium? (PDF) and paper on Products & Processes: How Innovation and Product Life-Cycles Can Help Predict The Future Of The Electronic Scholarly Journal.

The proceedings of the  1998 International Council for Science Press (ICSU) Workshop on Economics, real costs and benefits of electronic publishing in science are also of value. That gathering followed the 1996 ICSU-UNESCO conference on Electronic Publishing in Science and Paul Ginsparg's 1996 report on Winners & Losers in the Global Research Village.

The JEP paper Designing Electronic Journals With 30 Years of Lessons from Print by Carol Tenopir & Donald King drew on a range of studies in suggesting that some journals should publish in both print and electronic formats.

Keith Raney's JEP paper Into A Glass Darkly questioned whether electronic publishing would result in significant savings while maintaining existing standards. A more positive view is evident in The Hundred Years War Started Today: An Exploration of Electronic Peer Review, a 1996 article by John Peters. Iconoclast Steven Harnad advocated a revolution, with scientists self-publishing without the involvement of the commercial publishers. 

His arguments are expanded by Okerson and others in Scholarly Communications At The Crossroads, noted above, in Thomas Walker's paper The electronic future of scientific journals, and in the SPARC project described by Mark Rambler in Do It Yourself: A New Solution to the Journals Crisis. 

In Library Consumerism in the Digital Age, a paper by Johann van Reenen, librarians were castigated for "meekness" and scholars were urged to vote with their wallets. Terry Rohe more perceptively asked How Does Electronic Publishing Affect the Scholarly Communication Process?


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