Comments on: On Electronic Scholarly Publishing

By: John Willinsky

John Willinsky — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:30:47 +0000

The ElectraPress idea is a great and needed idea, and I am wondering if the work we’re doing here could help. I run the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.ubc.ca) at the University of British Columbia and as part of this work we have developed open source software for journal and conference management and publishing. The software is being used by about 400 journals, almost all open access, with 30 current conferences using the conference software.

I have been thinking about how Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) would lend itself very well to the submission process, peer reviewing, and editing of monographs (and edited collections), as well as enabling the online publishing of the books (with video, MP3 and whatnot). It would take some tweaking of OJS and a home for ElectraPress with some space on a Web server for the software.

By: jeremy hunsinger

jeremy hunsinger — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:03:18 +0000

The academic validation is actually a two fold problem. First you have to get people who think that participating in the peer-review process for something non-normal is worth their while… because most of the time scholarly presses and other normal publishers offer some sort of deal to get people to do things. Once you’ve managed past that hurdle, then the problem is getting it recognized by the greater academic community, luckily this is much easier now than we started, because now we have high quality print journals making the move to be pure e-journals, so that brings added reputation.

Organization and process… well, i’d guess that given the myriad of forms this takes in the publishing industry from editorial collectives to single person presses to corporate machines, in the end, anything that you think will be innovative will probably be a version of something that has a previous version in the world of paper. I’m really not sure that there is anything that you can do in the e-world that can be significantly different, because fundamentally organization and process are the human side. Speed though does change many of the dynamics.

If you though are talking about making the texts fluid, maleable, unfixed and such, then i wonder about audience and participation much more. I experimented with that at the cddc and we found that there is no way of ensuring quality and preventing defacement, without significant editorial oversight. But that was just my experience, others may have different ones.

In any case, it sounds like you are getting ready to take the step, so that’s good.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:00:12 +0000

Interesting. I’m going to have to think about this a little more, but I definitely like it.

As an aside: I once had a conversation with a friend in the sciences that went something like this:

Him: “So you just sent an essay off for consideration at a journal? How’s that work?”
Me: “3 printed copies of the article and two on disk.”
Him: “Where’s you send it? Steam Engine Quarterly?”

By: KF

KF — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:14:35 +0000

We...? CDDC? I take your point about the problem getting the word out, Jeremy, because I’m not terribly familiar with the group of whom you almost speak.

So yes, that kind of visibility is an issue, but one that’s quite possible to overcome once you’ve got a critical mass of people working cooperatively on the project (and by critical mass I mean upwards of 100). If the work is distributed, so is the knowledge, of necessity. But I’m also concerned with questions on the one hand of academic validation, and on the other of organization and process…

By: jeremy hunsinger

jeremy hunsinger — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 01:25:02 +0000

sounds vaguely familiar… oh…. that’s right, we’ve been doing this for amost 8 years now in one form or another :) full digital epress, creative commons license ebooks for the last two years and all that:) the problem i think you’ll find is getting the word out, because my efforts in this arena only hit certain communities, and it is very hard to build out into the broader humanities audiences.