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The world wide web has great potential as a publishing medium, both for original electronic publications as well as for mirrored (already in print) publications. Librarians, because of our experience as information providers, should not hesitate to become involved in web publishing projects. This presentation will describe the evolutionary experience of a web-based electronic journal, and will include a discussion of various issues confronting librarians who wish to publish on the web.
First, we need to support the scholarly communication process, and web publishing is a powerful symbol of our enfranchised role. Some of us are members of the faculty, and others are not, but we all need to be involved somehow in this process. Disseminating information is a function that traditionally has been associated with librarians (though not exclusively), and web publishing would appear to fit well into this traditional paradigm.
Second, we as librarians have a certain measure of expertise in the arena of organizing and providing access to information. What better way to share our skills with the academic community than by turning web documents into one-stop-shopping malls that offer the enduser subject access to a document along with the full-text of the document itself?
Third, web publishing gives us a higher profile on campus, which is an important asset these days because of the changing nature of higher education and the changing role of librarians.
Fourth, the web provides unique access to scholarly information because of its serendipitous nature, its immediacy, its hypertext structure, and its universal appeal. Why wouldn't librarians want to be involved with this exciting new technology at the publishing level?
Fifth, web publishing gives our parent institutions a positive reputation in the national and international academic communities. This is more important than ever given the current climate of declining enrollments that so many colleges face today.
Sixth, web publishing allows us to bypass the profit-based system of print publishing that has tormented librarians for years by gouging out huge chunks of money from our budgets. Many of us bemoan the fact that we must buy back (from traditional publishers) scholarship and research that originates on our own campuses (Boyce, 1996; Okerson & O'Donnell, 1995; Lancaster, 1995). Web publishing empowers us to break this multigenerational transmission process. This is disintermediation at a very high level, since it eliminates one of the main intermediaries (in this case, the print publisher) between author and reader.
However, as various authors (Crawford & Gorman 1995; Tenopir & King 1996) have pointed out, the economics of electronic publishing are not as simple as one might think at first glance. There are a variety of factors that raise the costs of traditional print journal publishing, such as copy editing, reviewing, and refereeing. Publishers that maintain (and pay for) high standards over many years build a reputation that in turn brings a certain measure of authenticity and authority to its articles. Will scholars want to publish in electronic journals that may not have the same level of perceived quality and authenticity? Will readers, researchers, and tenure committees grant the same authority and credence to electronic journals that they currently give to traditional journals?
A subscription to Progress sells for $10 per year. Despite this modest cost, the journal has few paid subscriptions. Web publishing seemed to us to be an effective way of spreading our research to the rest of the world without spending a fortune in marketing costs. I'm the "webweaver" for our college, and it was essentially my idea to mount Progress on the web. There was little debate from the faculty or editorial board on the merits of this idea.
The web version of Progress ({http://www.pgi.edu/progress.htm}) is what I like to call a "mirrored" publication. That is, the web site "mirrors" the print text in that it provides access to the same information in an entirely different format and with added value. There is room on the web for mirrored journals, but I think we will see more and more original publications appearing on the web in the coming months and years. The web bypasses many of the printing and distribution costs of print format, although it does not as yet have the prestige or authority that print journals carry.
The issue of refereed versus non-refereed journals is a sensitive one for a publication like Progress. Our scholarly tradition says that for a journal to be accepted as legitimate and authoritative, it must be refereed (preferably in a double-blind manner). Anything less, the tradition states, is open to accusations of vanity publishing. However, there are some disciplines (most notably, the law) where non-refereed journals carry equal weight with refereed journals. The best example of this is the Law Review, which is edited by students and generally does not submit its articles to the double-blind referee process. Whether or not this model will be followed (or even accepted) in the social science world remains to be seen.
There is likely to be some debate over the issue of free access versus fee-based access to scholarly web information. Obviously, for-profit publishers must protect their financial interest in research that they sponsor, and they are already devising ways to charge for web-based journals. (Indeed, the OCLC-based electronic journals are a good example of a fee-based system of scholarly web information). But non-profit academic institutions, who sponsor a great deal of today's research, may decide (if they choose to get into the web publishing arena) that the goal of disseminating information may take precedence over the goal of making money. In the case of Progress, lack of revenue from print subscriptions made the problem of whether or not free access to the web version would cut into the subscription base a moot point. But most web publishers will have to deal with this potential problem, especially in the case of mirrored journals.
How can we prevent others from ignoring the copyright restrictions and illegally reproducing the information in a different forum? At the present time we can't stop such behavior, but perhaps future technologies will allow us to prevent these unethical activities. However, while there may be intellectual reasons (such as the concept of "fair play", protection of the author's creation, etc.) for Progress to be concerned about copyright violations, there are certainly no compelling economic reasons for us to get involved in preventing copyright misuse. But we would have great concern if we were a for-profit publisher or if our authors had a financial stake in the distribution of their work.
Copyright law in its present form seems somewhat inappropriate when applied to the Internet. Some believe that the web's system of copying files back and forth across the Internet from server to client is actually a technical violation of the copyright law. Others, such as Bert Boyce (1996), feel that, even apart from Internet issues, the system of copyright as it applies to scholarly journal publishing is outmoded and unfair to authors. We hope that solutions to these two problems with the copyright law will emerge, converge, and enable us to restructure the system of rewarding and protecting authors of scholarly information in the coming century.
The plethora of search engines and web crawlers that are roaming the web today make the task of marketing a web publication somewhat easier. Other presentations in this conference will demonstrate the specific strategies to use when submitting information to a web search engine or when using HTML tags in the creation of a web publication. But the bottom line is that your web publication will receive few visitors if you do not market it through various means.
In other words, If you build it, they WILL come, but only if you properly market the merits of your web journal throughout the web community.
Another (more reputable) theory is that the web journal should replicate the print environment. That is, the web journal should retain the "look and feel" of the print version as much as possible, and should not add (or subtract) any material from the print journal. This theory wishes to honor the integrity of the journal and of the authors by maintaining a consistent standard across the different media. This approach views the web journal as simply one more platform upon which the content and format of the journal can stand. For example, print, microfiche, microfilm, online, and the web are all viewed as separate but equal media through which the journal can be published. Unfortunately, this viewpoint underestimates the power and flexibility of the web as a publishing conduit. It does not take into consideration the hypertext and multimedia aspects of the web that would allow the publisher or editor to add tremendous value to the web journal through hyperlinks and multimedia.
A third theory is more far-sighted and less conservative than the first two. This theory sees opportunities and possibilities in the new web medium instead of constraints and limitations. It seeks to add value to the web journal by indexing each article and by adding other links (both internal and external) to the document. The web environment can be utilized for maximum effect by employing such mechanisms as Java-based interactivity, forms-based letters to the editor, and even virtual reality. It is this approach that holds tremendous promise for web publishing as a radical departure from the old order.
I see Progress as a third order web journal. That is, I want to add value to the text by indexing and hyperlinking it. While each article has been fully indexed, time constraints have limited the number of hyperlinks added to each article. Also, some of the concerns expressed below (related to hyperlinking) have contributed to the lack of value-added markup.
Another solution is to create a database of documents with an underlying search engine familiar to the community (for example, the university's online catalog search software might be modified to allow full-text documents to be retrieved). Then, a telnet gateway or CGI scripting can be utilized to allow full access through the web. This method can be expensive for the publisher, but it also can be confusing to users who often do not expect to see a different (i.e., non-web-based) search engine while surfing the web.
An inexpensive and relatively elegant solution is to use one of the newer "web builder" software applications that use MARC, dBase, or ASCII records to create a searchable web database. We used BestWeb (http://www.bestseller.com) in our project primarily because of the price tag, but the results were more than satisfactory. BestWeb allowed us to build a database of bibliographic records that was searchable through three different access points (we chose author, title, and subject). In turn, we linked these records to the full-text documents (which had been converted to HTML), thus creating (in effect) a one-step lookup for users.
Another kind of linkage (that is actually relatively common on the web) is to connect each reference cited in the text of the article with the full bibliographic citation at the end of the article. Readers can then toggle back and forth between the body of the article and the bibliography.
One of the major problems in adding hotlinks to any kind of web document is the time-consuming nature of the task. There is intellectual effort (which words or phrases should be marked up? how many? how often? where should the hotlinks point to?) as well as physical effort (the actual marking up of the text). Publishers of web documents must ask themselves if the added value (which is sometimes debatable) of hyperlinking the text is worth the extra work.
Should hyperlinks be internal (self-referential) or external? Self-referential links are easier to control, but external links are more interesting. For example, a self-referential link would connect one piece of an author's article to another piece of the same article. Perhaps all references to a particular citation within the article could be linked together.
External links are more risky, but they are also certainly more rewarding. An external link might connect a mention of the American Psychological Association to the APA home page. It might anchor a reference to a particular author listed in the bibliography to that author's home page or e-mail address. The risk comes when these links become orphaned by changed or defunct URLs.
Crawford and Gorman (1995), in their sane but perhaps overly cautious book, criticize attempts to convert essentially linear text to hypertext documents. This criticism is especially trenchant when "overhyperlinking" takes place. Overhyperlinking an article from a web journal, especially when done from the editorial (unilateral) perspective, is unfair to both author and reader. This has already become a problem for more ephemeral web documents, such as home pages, and could end up detracting from the value of the original article in more scholarly web publishing.
Second, we should be actually publishing full-text articles (research and/or opinion pieces) on the web. These articles can be placed on our own home pages, or (better yet) they can be given a place of prominence on the campus or library web server. The research can be written by and for librarians, or it can be more broadly based and venture outside our field into other disciplines. As the media has informed us on a different matter, "Just do it!"
Third, librarians should be indexing these web publications. While full-text indexing has often proven to be less than helpful in terms of precision and recall issues, these published articles deserve at least the basic intellectual access points of author, title, and subject. Others more qualified than me will debate the merits of automated indexing versus human-generated indexing, but my limited knowledge of this area leads me to believe that there is still a need for human subject catalogers and indexers.
Fourth, we should be adding value to web publications through internal and external hyperlinks, being careful to stay within the legal, ethical, and aesthetic boundaries of copyright, authorial integrity, and web page design. These links make the web more than just another platform on which we can mount written research. The value-added aspects of the web, especially its almost universal accessibility, its immediacy, and its hypertext nature, make a powerful and compelling argument for the concept of scholarly web publishing.
Crawford, W. & Gorman, M. 1995. Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality. American Library Association, Chicago.
Guedon, J. 1995. Research libraries and electronic scholarly journals: challenges or opportunities? Serials Librarian 26 (3- 4): 1-20.
Hunter, K. 1988. Academic librarians and publishers: customers versus producers or partners in the planning of electronic publishing? Journal of Library Administration 9 (4): 35-48.
Lancaster, F.W. Spring 1995. Networked Scholarly Publishing. Theme issue of Library Trends 43 (4).
Okerson, A. S., & O'Donnell, J. J. 1995. Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Association of Research Libraries.
Tenopir, C., & King, D. 1996. Setting the record straight on journal publishing: myth vs. reality. Library Journal 121 (5): 32-35.