So far in this series I have described two types of publishing we are going to see more of as the humanities (with the rest of academia) retool for the digital age: electronic publication of conventional scholarship, and Open Access publication. In this post, I discuss a third type of electronic publishing: the online archive. But wait a minute, you might say, archiving and publishing are very different things. Scholars publish; librarians archive. Right? Well, the lines have blurred, as has the very definition of what constitutes publishing today. But before discussing the changing nature of publishing, let me quickly define the online archive and sketch how it works.
Please visit Academic Evolution, a blog I've broken out from this one. Discussion at Academic Evolution is focused on changes in higher education and issues regarding access, pedagogy, and publishing in the age of new media.
In the next four posts I will characterize four general types of electronic publishing, moving from that sort which is most like traditional print scholarship to that which is least so.
The first, "Electronic Conventional Scholarship," can be considered the closest to
traditional publishing. It includes online versions of established print
journals (such as Modern
Philology) or, increasingly, journals with no print history or counterpart
(such as Textual
Studies in Canada). Also within this category are the many digitized issues of back issues available through collections such as JSTOR.
The presentation on Open Access that Jeff Belliston and I had previously prepared was well received yesterday by the assembled deans, the Academic Vice President, and the President of BYU. I was impressed by our Academic Vice President's keen interest in the issues. And while this institution is still a long ways off from something like the Harvard Open Access mandate for our faculty, there is clearly interest and awareness at the top.
At a presentation on Open Access to the Academic Vice President's Council at BYU last week we discussed changes in academic publishing and proposed moving toward a Open Access policy for this university comparable to Harvard's.
A key component of the Open Access movement is the rise of institutional and disciplinary repositories. While these are archives, their role will not be purely archival. A repository becomes a de facto publishing platform, and the publishing it will do will not be limited to republishing copies of scholarly articles that have first appeared elsewhere. An institutional repository will be a place where faculty can deposit their teaching materials. Open Access meets Open Teaching.
Social networking sites for scholars are emerging, I was pleased to discover in reading the Nov 9 issue of The Wired Campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I am absolutely certain that what for many remains only a curiosity for now will be the mainstay of scholarly communication and collaboration in the future. I checked out Pronetos: Professor's Network, which advertises itself as a home to communities of scholars of every academic discipline.
