Once upon a time
There were Traditonal Paper-Based Research/Scholarship ..
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- The content of these journals were sanctioned, published, and peer reviewed by credible external entities such as scholarly societies, research institutions, or government agencies
- The content was presented in accepted scholarly formats of research papers, reports, conference/symposia presentations, and independent research
- The content relied on a textual expression of valid data produced by a tested, measurable, information gathering process. The result of which, provided new insight to an idea or process that quoted, extended, built upon or altered the work of others.
- The content often provided points of visual reference which included images, graphs, charts, statistical presentations, etc.
- The sponsoring agency sanctioned the validity and relevance of the content primarily by peer review
- The presentation was published in bound paper entities of soft or hard covered containers at regular or irregular intervals based on established criteria
- The presentation included clear authority or authorship responsible for the content as well as clear attribution where the work of others was used in its arguments.
- The sponsoring agency distributed the publication to its members and subscribers for a price.
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Then came the Internet
And it became possible for credible external entities to …
- Leverage a faster wider network of peer review and validation opprtunities
- Improve upon traditional scholarly presentation formats to illustrate and reinforce textual and abstract content in more efficient, non-linear, multimodal ways
- Easier to access and gather information from more sources
- Easier to test, measure and validate data, using computational systems
- Invites the opportunity to store, reuse and share oft discarded raw data
- Cheaper to produce
- Easier to distribute to members and subscribers or make available to all
- Easier to reproduce, extend, quote, alter
- Barriers to frequency of publication may be removed
- Opportunities to enhance referential and supporting content through sound, video, advanced imaging and simulation presentation
- Opportunity to reconsider (not abandon) matters of authority and atribution and leverage the significant power of collaboration
- Opportunity for good work to spread faster and quantify actual usage post-publication
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We might ask ourselves ..
- Is the publisher/sanctioning agency credible? What is this threshold?
- Is the scholarship Peer Reviewed? – and how? (traditional, comments, open PR)
- Is authority for the work and supporting references well established? Does it need to be? (collaboration, community)
- Does this scholarship gain from presentation and distribution in an electronic format?
(visually, functionally, accuracy, usability, accessibilty, financially, data reuse, etc.?)
- Would this research flourish if it were available free to all?
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So what actually happened in scholarly publication…
Publishers began testing the waters:
- Journals built online versions of their journals
- Authors retained their rights to their research and distributed where and how they wish
- Presentation of Scholarship incorporating new media formats
A Crisis of Costs spurred:
- Some Journals have migrated to online-only versions of their journals
- Libraries resist duplication, cut paper titles, and invest in online access. Several Institutions move to Online-Only (name them)
- Thousands of new online peer reviewed journals have been created
Innovations occurred
- New models of Peer review evolved
- New models of publication emerges and expands beyond societies and institutions to larger discipline-centric scholarly “portals” (
- Repositories of related research is gathered and organized in new places and new ways. (BioCentral)
- Institutional repositories or Pseudo-University Presses emerge (MIT)
- Peer Reviewed Open Access Electronic Journals makes a big
Final Ponder… What has changed? Which should we emphasize?
Process of Electronic Pubishing
How it alters content
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