The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) recently held its 3rd international conference in Berlin, marking the ‘ coming of age’  of what started as a movement for open access publishing in the late 1990s. Then, a loose coalition of professors, librarians, and graduate students reacted to the increasingly expensive and closed character of many academic journals, and prepared a system for open access publishing called Open Journal Systems (OJS). The PKP 2011 Berlin conference reflected the maturity of the original open access initiative and mirrored the professional organization and quality content found at major discipline-based conferences.

Screenshot from PKP website; founder John Willinsky in photo

This conference was attended by some 150 librarians, scholars, and publishers coming from institutions located in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity suggested the extensiveness of interest in open access scholarly publishing, and the presentations ranged from cases describing the launch of open access journals to reflections on new directions for access to scholarship, such as enhanced publications and data repositories. The program schedule includes the slides and papers for many of the contributions to the conference, making it easy for persons unable to attend the event to gain an impression.

One of the most impressive cases presented during the three-day event was about the range of e-journal publishing services offered by the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2007 some 27 open access journals have been launched and supported by the Pittsburgh University Library System. All of the titles follow the accepted and expected conventions of peer review and involvement of recognized scholars in journal editorial boards.  The editors of these titles are located around the world and not just at the host institution. Although open and free, the UP staff has developed  rigorous selection procedures for taking on a new titles and candidate editors must demonstrate clearly formulated editorial policies, interest by specialists in the proposed titles, and sufficient organizational structure to ensure sustainability. In return, staff from the UP Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing provide technical and publisher-style support to the titles taken on board. See the abstract and slides of this presentation for further details.

Pittsburgh criteria for supporting journal initiatives

The titles supported by the University of Pittsburgh, like most of the titles employing OJS software, publish articles in conventional pdf-file format without the many forms of article enhancement now being developed by commercial publishers such as Elsevier and SAGE – pop-up windows with abstracts and references, enlargement of article illustrations, dynamic updating of citation data in bibliographic entries. A few presentations at this PKP conference, however, did consider enhancing scholarly publications. Marnix van Berchum from Utrecht University and the SURFfoundation, for example, suggested that incorporation of such features may be easier than most think in his presentation  appropriately entitled “Enhanced Journals…Made Easy”.

Advice from Van Berchum’s presentation on enhanced publications

 Whether the challenges involved in enhancing scholarly publications are “easy” may be a matter of background, prior experience, and the peculiarities of the publication. Another presentation on forms of enhancement of scholarly monographs suggested a wide range of challenges far from simple. This presentation, delivered by eHumanities Group members Clifford Tatum, Andrea Scharnhorst and Nick Jankowski considered some of the trials and tribulations in preparing enhanced versions of book monographs. The abstract and paper is available on the PKP conference website.

One of the difficulties these researchers encountered was maintaining interest among chapter authors to prepare supplemental material for the websites complementing the traditionally published monographs. Another challenge this team faced was interlinking materials from one book to other titles with similar topics – achieving interoperability among book ‘objects’. These challenges aside, the initiatives at enhancing scholarly publications undertaken by this group are being extended to other eHumanities initiatives, some of which might merit presentation at a future PKP conference.

Schema representing interoperability among publication ‘objects’

A short response on the Humanist Discussion Group about journal editing software was enough to send me on a discovery trip this morning to a journal about which I was previously unaware: Digital Medievalist. Many aspects of this online-only open access title are interesting, two of which have already been noted: online and open access. The layout of the title is clean and attractive; although the editor is reserved about some of the functionality of the journal management system being used, Open Journal Systems (OJS), my first impression of the site is positive, as is my impression of the submission system, reviewing procedures, and elaborate guidelines for authors regarding manuscript preparation.

In terms of article enhancement, the basic features and expectations of a hyperlink Web environment are present:  embedded links for navigating within an article as well as to sources outside the publication. Large-size color figures are used as opposed to the thumbnail size that can be popped up, now appearing in a wide range of online journals. Bibliographic entries also do not pop up when clicking on an in-text reference, but clicking on the link takes one directly to the entry. The journal has dispensed with issues and organizes published articles on an annual basis – another feature increasingly common among online journals. These are, of course, very minor matters of design, which have little to no importance in the larger arena of concerns. Above all, this journal and the related features of mailing list, wiki, and news service seem to provide an assortment of communicative features for what is probably a relatively small  but internationally distributed community of medieval scholars.

Another attractive feature of smallness **may** be the intent to circumvent the stranglehold imposed by academic institutions and other contributors to the community (e.g. individual scholars, publishers, assessment committees). Journals have become a misused device for measuring quality of scholarship through expectations for academics to publish in ISI titles with high impact factors, creating a culture of accumulating published articles in the so-called ‘top journals’. This approach is often imposed by assessment committees,  reinforced by institutions and departments, and adopted as ‘standard practice’ by tenured and nontenured faculty. It is of little benefit to any of the mentioned actors, including the journals that become ‘used’ by both individual scholars  and their institutions in the name of research assessment. I have no idea whether Digital Medievalist and academics active in that niche area of scholarship are able to avoid the assessment ‘rat race’ in which many of the rest of us are – by necessity – engaged, but I would like to hope so….

Back to enhancement, this journal probably does not subscribe to the ontology model promoted by SURF and, in fact, many other institutions concerned with persistent identifiers, resource maps, and general deconstruction of a publication into ‘objects’ that are stored in a database for purposes of access and retrieval, and ‘interoperability’ and interlinking – all the kind of concerns prominent in the work of Herbert Van de Sompel and many others (I mention Van de Sompel because he gave an enticing presentation (here are his slides) on this vision during the e-Humanities Group (eHg) Research Meeting, 16 June, along with a presentation by those of us involved in the eHg Enhanced Publication Project; see slides here.) One of the distinctions Van de Sompel emphasized is the difference between repository-centric and resource-centric architecture of Web-based publications. The present scale of Digital Medievalist may not require or make possible such concern (the journal has been in operation since 2005 and publishes, on average, five articles a year). But if I were launching a journal today, I think I would want to seriously consider these ‘under the hood’ features that make publication enhancement much more than clean design and hyperlinks….

A recent post, titled: Web 2.0 and/or Semantic Web?, provides background and rationale for our hybrid approach to enhanced publications. The diagram below is an expression of this approach. In this project, like many others in the VKS/eHumanities portfolio, we employ WordPress Content Management Software (CMS) as the foundation for digital scholarship. The diagram displays functional modules in three clusters: the WordPress software (upper left), community-developed WordPress plugins (lower left) and our custom plugins (right).

I have just completed the slides for a presentation on enhanced publications to be given at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, on 10 June 2011, which are available here. It’s always a pleasure preparing slides for such presentations and I delighted this time in searching for images of Ted Nelson’s notion of hypertext to serve as an entry point for both early and future enhancement, knowing quite well that enhanced publication means more than Nelson had in mind when he first conceived of hypertext in 1963, but also knowing that incorporation of the kind of linkages between the objects of a publication, scholarly or otherwise, then proposed goes a very long ways to achieving what many of us presently mean by enhancing scholarship.

An announcement and abstract for the presentation is available below. Perhaps more appropriate for a blog post than either the abstract or the entire collection of 29 slides would be a short elaboration of three of the images: one on a recent effort to identify the core constituents of Enhanced Publications, one reflecting current innovation (albeit distant from conventional scholarship), and one suggesting tomorrow’s efforts at enhancement.  First, the core constituents. This slide leans heavily on previous work of Woutersen-Windhouwer and Brandsma (2009), which is part of a collection to elaborate the meaning and rationale of enhancement in scholarly publishing. In the conclusion to their essay, these authors establish a checklist of items to consider when enhancing publications (2009: 80).

Check list for Enhanced Publications

Although appreciated, this list fails to distinguish core components from those that are more peripheral. As is common with checklists, the items are either ‘on’ or ‘off’ and, as such, lack variability; no indication is provided as to which or how many of the items are required to satisfy the label ‘enhancement’. As a beginning, such a checklist may be helpful, but I would argue that a more pluralistic vision of enhancement would be more suitable at this stage of development than one seeemingly based in an ‘essentialist’ framework. A modest step I have prepared in that direction is a compact set of features commonly associated with enhanced publications, differentiating core and secondary features.

Core & Secondary Components of EP

The presentation begins with what is perhaps the most impressive site of enhanced publication that I have encountered: the Visualizing Cultures research project at MIT. The site is a paradise for historical scholars and instructors concerned with imagery related to specific periods in Japanese and Chinese encounters with the West. Although the site probably falls far short of the Woutersen-Windhouwer and Brandsma checklist for enhancement, it represents utilization of the Web for facilitating scholarship seldom achieved by the rest of us struggling to incorporate Web features in our publications.

A very recent and innovative incorportion of features is evident in the book / Web publication of Al Gore’s latest foray into environmental issues, Our Choice. This publication involves a conventional printed book, but with a website providing much complementing material: videos, samplings from the chapters, notes with links to additional material, and dazzling illustrations. I know of no established commercial publisher that has attempted such interweaving of the Web with the printed version. This book is not scholarship in the conventional sense and Gore is certainly more activist than academic, but those of us more directly involved in scholarship could learn much from this initiative at enhancement.

Finally, I return in the slides to a homage to Ted Nelson and one of the early drawings based on his pioneering work with hyperlinking, suggesting how a hypothetical history project might interrelate components of the project – the text, the footnotes, bibliography, illustrations, different topics in the ‘argument’.

Nelson's Notion of Hyperlinking & Hypothetical History Project

As acknowledged at the start of this post, I am aware that ‘enhanced publication’ has come to mean much more than hyperlinking, still I continue to feel that few of us have made such a basic ‘first step’ in our efforts to utilize the Web as environment for publishing our scholarship….

Public Lecture

Nicholas W. Jankowski

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, FDV-19

Friday, 10 June, 14.30-15.30

Enhancing Conventionally Prepared Scholarly Publications Through Web-based Complements: Reflections on an Initiative

Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences are increasingly exploring ways to make research available on the Web. Instruments for data collection and analysis, datasets and metadata describing this material, conference papers  and project reports are all finding their way into Web-based repositories. One area lagging behind in this trend, however, is a Web venue that integrates the traditionally published book with the diverse materials related to an overall research project. In this presentation I describe an initiative to construct Web venues to complement four conventionally published scholarly books. Termed ‘enhanced publications’, this initiative is part of a national  program in the Netherlands experimenting with Web-based publishing. I will highlight some of the special features of these Web-based complements to the books and share reactions from publishers and authors to the initiative expressed during the recently held conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). Additional details on enhanced publications can be found on an informational flyer prepared for the ICA, available on SlideShare.

Biographical sketch: Nicholas Jankowski is Visiting Fellow at the e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He is co-editor of the journal New Media & Society and editor of the Hampton Press book series Euricom Monographs: New Media & Democracy. He recently edited e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice (Routledge, 2009) and is preparing a textbook on digital media for Polity Press (2012).

The eHumanities Enhanced Publication (EP) project is envisioned as a hybrid platform that leverages Web 2.0 participatory modes of scholarly communication combined with formalized content structures imposed by Semantic Web formats. Translating this vision into a database design and formalized object relationships brings into focus contemporary tensions related to scholarly communication in the digital era. Specifically, innovation and diffusion of informal communication practices is occurring at a higher rate than modes of formal communication.

Asymmetric change in formal/informal communication practices seems to put pressure on their respective roles. Research shows increased acceptance of novel forms of scholarly communication on the Web, but enduring preference to publish in traditional journals rather than choosing web-based venues (Harley et al. 2010). Crucially, this preference is tied the academic system of professional assessment and reward (Procter et al. 2010). While the top-down Semantic Web and bottom-up Web 2.0 intertextual structures are not inherently incompatible, their differences have implications for the design, use, and diffusion of enhanced scholarly publications. Using this distinction as a starting point, it is useful to consider how each approach maps onto expectations about how EPs will be used.

The formalization of object relationship structures entailed in the Semantic Web approach is most compatible with the formal publication of research and scholarship. In comparison, Web 2.0 applications and practices are more oriented to informal modes of communication whereby published texts can be discussed, critiqued, and interpreted. However, this mapping suggests a false symmetry between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, and formal/informal modes of scholarly communication. With this in mind, following is an overview of the EP project, a discussion of particular structural mechanics underpinning the Semantic Web and Web 2.0, and the ways in which digital enhancements in this project are expected to facilitate scholarly communication.

The Project-

As described elsewhere in more detail, the basic architecture for this project includes a database driven website for each of four traditionally published books related to e-research along with a central aggregation database that facilitates queries within and across the four books. Still an important mode of scholarly communication, particularly in the Humanities, the academic book format has seen relatively little enhancement from the affordances of digital media, networked content, and database technologies. Setting aside the tantalizing question of how the book could or should be redesigned to fully leverage digital media, there is potential for creating enhancements for the book in its present form. This EP project is conceived with the present book opportunities (and limitations) in mind.

In the project diagram above, each website is depicted with a local database, each of which is connected to a central database whose sole purpose is to provide query functionality across the collection of websites. In this way each book website retains an individual web presence with local content management (and storage). Simple content relationships are articulated through the mechanics of hyperlinks, which are comprised of three components: context, situated meaning, and object.

Triples and Content Relationships-

Both Web 2.0 and Semantic Web provide content structures that facilitate interoperability within and among knowledge domains. Both utilize a ‘triple‘ construct that defines the individual object relationships within a domain that in aggregate comprise a significant dimension of content structure. However, the Semantic Web imposes a top-down structure based on formalized object relationships and Web 2.0 facilitates emerging structures through user contributions, primarily through ad-hoc interlinking of content.

The hyperlink defines a simple relationship between local text and a referenced resource. Selection of the local text can serve as the ‘physical’ linking mechanism and at the same time it specifies what the remote content is, both to the reader and to machine-based aggregation, e.g. search engine crawlers. The linked-text names the link and, along with the direction of the link, helps to define the relationship between the two linked objects.

Through hyperlinking, documents, collections of documents, and related audio and visual resources are structured across the web (Halavais 2008, 43). In this bottom-up, nonhierarchical fashion, features of Web 2.0 facilitate co-construction of intertextual discourses. However, content structures emerging from Web 2.0 practices, such as hyperlinking, suffer from some basic linguistic limitations, such as homonyms and synonyms. (Vossen and Hagemann, 2007). In this way, the flexibility of Web 2.0 can also limit the precision of aggregated content.

Formalization of content relationships through Semantic Web approaches is intended to improve content interoperability. Whereas Web 2.0 applications and practices facilitate the emergence of content structures through user contributions, the Semantic Web approach imposes an ontology that defines a structure through object relationships.

The Semantic Web format is known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which refers to the structural mechanisms that define object relationships and data interchange specifications (W3C 2011). Of interest here are the object relationships, which are expressed in triples (i.e. subject – object – predicate) and are the building blocks for creating a localized ontology.

The RDF triple is different from the hyperlink in two important ways. It defines object relationships through simple facts about kinds of objects within a particular domain and each part of the triple has a unique identifier or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). In comparison, the hyperlink connects two objects and in the process the relationship is named in ways that are not always relevant to the meaning of the relationship. For example, a common link naming convention, such as: ‘you can find the report here,’ where the word here, does very little to give meaning to the link.

Additionally, the objects are connected by a hyperlink, which itself does not have a unique URI as such. Instead, the HTML code that defines a hyperlink is embedded in the local content and the code construction includes the URL for the linked-to object. The three distinct parts of the object relationship are identifiable within the local HTML code, but the hyperlink is not an entity separate from the two linked objects. Functionally, the RDF triple and hyperlink are surprisingly similar. Nevertheless, implications of these seemingly minor differences are particularly relevant at the level of content aggregation.

Semantic web formats “gain their expressive power at the expense of increasingly complex design processes, in particular, when it comes to the design of an ontology” and “increased complexity of concepts, deductions and other computations” (Vossen and Hagemann, 2007: 335). The expected payoff though, is increased content interoperability within and across different knowledge domains. Predefined triples, combined as a local content ontology, are the basis for the sorts sophisticated content organization and machine readability envisioned by Semantic Web approaches.

Concluding Remarks-

In the face of transformative Internet technologies over the past couple decades, the formal system of academic publishing has seen relatively little change. This is not surprising given the need to maintain integrity and organization of formal knowledge. Semantic Web structures are envisioned as a way to create more precise interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains, while still retaining a rigorous grip on the accumulation of new knowledge. Meanwhile, a wide variety of new informal communication practices have emerged at a pace that more closely resembles popular use of digital media. Popularity in academic use of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, Twitter, video and image sharing sites, and related features of social networking services, indicates changes in the form of scholarly communication–in addition to the emergence of new communication practices.

A significant challenge in this project are the tensions between our aim to expose book content to the kinds of intertextual discourse possible on the Web and the formal content structure facilitated by Semantic Web formats. Combining attributes serves to offset their respective weaknesses while also avoiding the sticky issue of distinguishing between formal and informal modes of communication. Whereas the Semantic Web triple establishes object relationships within a particular set of content, the Web 2.0 hyperlink is always a specific relationship between two content objects located on the Web. This fundamental conceptual difference creates a tension, which to some extent is indicative of the scholarly communication system in a state of uncertain change.

The juxtaposition of formal and informal communication with respect to Semantic Web and Web 2.0 provides an opportunity to reflect on normative roles scholarly communication in relation to emerging new practices. In our hybrid approach, we expose book content to the construction of intertextual discourses occurring on the Web. In addition, the content is hyperlinked to cited references and related resources. In this way, books can be contextualized within the discourses and resources. This sort of situating of book content actively increases its exposure on the Web through increased access within a network and through increased visibility in search engine queries.

We also structure the book content through formal object relationships defined in a book-website ontology. Exposing book content to the burgeoning Semantic Web also increases its exposure, but in a more passive way and potentially in a more precise way. It is passive because access to Semantic Web aggregation is still somewhat limited to specialized repositories and machine aggregation that adds an additional layer of mediation between humans and content. While Semantic Web projects seem to be on the rise, expected contribution to scholarly communication more broadly is presently seen as a longer-term investment.

UPDATE 09 June 2011: See here for a diagram of our hybrid approach. It displays functional modules in three clusters: the WordPress software (upper left), community-developed WordPress plugins (lower left) and our custom plugins (right).

References:

Halavais, Alexander. 2008. “The Hyperlink as Organizing Principle.” In The hyperlinked society: questioning connections in the digital age, eds. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui. University of Michigan Press.

Harley, Diane, Sophia Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King. 2010. Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley.

Procter, Rob et al. 2010. “Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368(1926): 4039 -4056.

Vossen, Gottfried, and Stephan Hagemann. 2007. Unleashing Web 2.0: From Concepts to Creativity. Morgan Kaufmann.

W3C. “Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax.” (Accessed June 5, 2011).

The Public Knowledge Project is organizing the bi-annual Third International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, September 26 – 28, 2011, in Berlin, in collaboration  with the Freie Universität Berlin. This particular PKP conference provides opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the decade-old Open Access Initiative, launched in December 2001. We are pleased to be included in the program of this conference and will be presenting a paper outlining and reflecting on the SURF-supported e-Humanities Group Enhanced Publications Project. Below is the abstract of our paper; the preliminary PKP conference program is available here.

Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Innovation through Hybrid Forms of Publication

(Project Members: Nick Jankowski, Andrea Scharnhorst, Clifford Tatum, and Zuotian Tatum)

Enhancing scholarly publication involves presentation in a Web environment with interlinking of the ‘objects’ of a document such as: data on which the publication is based, supplementary materials, and post-publication reactions and secondary analyses. In addition to providing easy – and preferably open – access to scientific and scholarly output, motivations for pursuing such enhancements include the benefits associated with large repositories. Development of the Semantic Web is specifically aimed at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized meta data formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. Meanwhile, ad-hoc scholarly discourse, facilitated by participatory dynamics of Web 2.0 applications, contributes to an emergent content structure through compliance with existing open Web standards. While the top-down Semantic Web and bottom-up intertextuality structure are not inherently incompatible, their differences have implications for the design, use, and diffusion of enhanced scholarly publications. In this paper we illustrate a hybrid approach that employs Semantic Web techniques while focusing on emergent practices entailed in contemporary intertextual discourses.

The project involves enhancement of scholarly publications through preparation of complementary Web sites accompanying four books released by traditional academic publishers. These Web sites contain a broad range of features intended to enhance the printed versions of these books, including supplementary resources, visualization, hyperlinks, and updating of chapter materials. In addition, the project involves development of a database that allows for aggregation of content across the individual book Web sites, such that relationships, underpinnings, and contextual factors are made explicit. Together with a user interface, this database and related features are designed to support ad-hoc queries and real-time visualizations of discursive threads on the Web sites.

Web sites are presently being developed for the following four books:

• Jankowski, N. W. (ed.) (2009). e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. New York: Routledge. 
• Wouters, P., Beaulieu, A., Scharnhorst, A., & Wyatt, S. (eds.) (forthcoming). Virtual Knowledge (under review by MIT Press). 
• Jankowski, N. W. (forthcoming, 2012). Digital Media: Concepts & Issues, Research & Resources. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Park, D., Jankowski, N. W., & Jones (eds.) (forthcoming, May 2011). The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Newness Contextualized. New York: Peter Lang.

A standard template for the Web sites has been prepared and adapted to the first of the above four titles; see e-Research book site. At the time of preparation of this abstract, the template is being adapted to the other titles. In addition, an overarching database of book objects is under construction and will be elaborated in the paper. While Semantic Web formats are intended to facilitate interoperability between situated ontologies, the focus of this project is on engagement with emerging scholarly practices in a discursive environment where meaning is both situated and fluid. Relevant to this focus, we develop custom plugins to incorporate Semantic Web formats for WordPress, an open source Web 2.0 platform. The paper concludes with reflection on the development of Web sites for these traditional academic publications and the suitability of such integration of Web and print environments for scholarly communication more generally.

Members of the eHumanities Group Enhanced Publications (EP) Project are involved in two panels scheduled in the iCS / OII Symposium A Decade in Internet Time, at the University of Oxford, 21-24 September 2011. One of the panels deals with changes in scholarly communication, including issues related to enhanced publishing; the second panel includes editors and authors associated with the book Virtual Knowledge, one of the four volumes in the EP Project.   The symposium schedule is available here.

Contributions to the panel on scholarly communication are also earmarked as contributions to a theme issue of New Media & Society. The proposal for that theme issue is, in actuality, a mirror image of the original proposal for the symposium panel. Because the NM&S  issue and symposium panel are ‘deliverables’ of the EP Project, text from the document is excerpted below.

Scholarly Communication: Changes, Challenges & Initiatives

New Media & Society Theme Issue

Co-editors: Nicholas Jankowski & Steve Jones

For many years, a broad range of stakeholders – publishers, editors, authors, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies – have been concerned with the ‘crisis in scholarly communication’ and, relatively recently, have been exploring ways to incorporate the potentials of the Web into the enterprise. Although concerns vary, five thematic clusters are prominent:

• Integrating formal (e.g., journal article) and informal (e.g., social media) modes into scholarly communication;
• Incorporating features of the Web into scholarly publishing, including: hypertext, multimedia, color and dynamic visualizations, accessibility to data and supplementary materials, and author-reader interaction;
• Searching for new models of financing scholarly publishing in an environment of declining resources;
• Increasing access to scholarship and developing digital repositories;
• Exploring alternatives to conventional double-blind peer review assessment procedures.

These concerns are complex and there is limited agreement as to how they should be addressed. Disciplines across the sciences and humanities are facing different challenges because of their respective cultures and resources; consequently, a wide range of reactions to these challenges is appearing, some of which appear reactionary while others seem innovative. Peer review, for example, continues to be the ‘gold standard’ for determination of quality in many disciplines, but whether the process should be blind and confidential is increasingly being questioned; experiments are being undertaken with alternative, open review procedures. Further, the added communicative features of Web publishing like those noted above come at an economic price and it is uncertain which of the parties involved in scholarly publishing are in a position to finance such features. Advocacy of open access may be attractive in principle, but it is often unclear how implementation can be achieved when academic departments encourage their staff to publish in high status periodicals, which because of price are frequently restricted to (institutional) subscribers.

The above concerns suggest the panorama of topics to be addressed by contributions to a theme issue of New Media & Society (NM&S). The issue stems from a panel prepared for the symposium A Decade in Internet Time and includes contributions from scholars involved in that and related events. Contributors are associated with initiatives in Web-based publishing and are engaged in the study of changes in scholarly publishing and communication. Some have been involved in on-going discussions about scholarly publishing in other venues, such as the Journal of Electronic Publishing theme issue on ‘Reimaging the University Press’ and a roundtable at an Association of Internet Researchers conference, Digital Scholarship. Other contributors have been concerned with long-term exploration of changes in scholarly publishing and communication, such as those undertaken at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at UC Berkeley. Yet other contributors are affiliated with a pan-European investigation (ACUMEN) of assessment procedures across domains of scholarship, including procedures for peer review of research and publications. This theme issue of NM&S provides opportunity to continue discussion and exploration of new directions for scholarly publishing and communication.

The co-editors of NM&S plan to prepare this issue in collaboration with the contributors and to experiment with alternatives to conventional double-blind peer review and traditional print-based journal publishing. Following the procedures initiated by Shakespeare Quarterly in a special issue ‘Shakespeare and New Media’, possibilities will be explored with MediaCommons allowing for a form of open and blind review of contributions. Building on recent initiatives with ‘enhanced publications’, the editors will explore with the publisher of NM&S, SAGE Publications, regarding a manner in which features of the Web can be included in a complementary version of the print journal.

I am frequently impressed by the stunning designs of websites maintained by colleagues, research projects, and academic institutions, which strikingly refute the conventional stereotype of monochrome staidness and simplicity associated with scholarly labor. Examples of beautiful scholarly sites abound, but three serve to illustrate such contrast to the stereotype: the site of the department program Digital Cultures and Creativity at the University of Maryland (UM), the research project Visualizing Culture at MIT, and the personal website of Jason Farman at UM.

The pace of transformation of academic labor from the conventional to the dynamic and colorful in a Web environment is exceedingly rapid, and the above dazzling designs highlight a fundamental concern in classical rhetoric: the relation between form and content. In terms of enhanced publications, the question is: What is the place of website design in relation to core principles of enhanced publishing (EP)? More precisely, what is the relation between the content (components) of scholarship and the presentation of that scholarship in a Web environment?

An adequate response to such a question would easily require the length available to standard journal articles, 7000-8000 words, far exceeding limitations generally imposed on a mere blog post. The essence, though, can be composed in a couple of paragraphs…and here they come.

The SURF tender for its enhanced publications program provides a concise description of enhanced publications:

Een Verrijkte Publicatie bestaat uit een publicatie, meestal in de vorm van tekst, verrijkt met extra materialen. Een publicatie kan een artikel in een tijdschrift, een proefschrift, rapport, notitie of een hoofdstuk uit een boek zijn. Voorwaarde is dat het over (wetenschappelijk) onderzoek gaat en een interpretatie of analyse bevat van primaire data of een afgeleide daarvan. Het begeleidende materiaal kan bijvoorbeeld bestaan uit onderzoeksdata, beeldmateriaal ter illustratie, metadatasets en post-publicatie data zoals commentaren en ranking gegevens. Door de veranderende post-publicatie data is het mogelijk dat een Verrijkte Publicatie zich blijft doorontwikkelen in de tijd. (Wat is een Verrijkte Publicatie?)

Basically, for readers unable to decipher this description in Dutch, it suggests that enhanced publications consist of materials related to scientific research made publically available – published – and may consist of a variety of components or ‘objects’: text, data, visualizations, and post-publication commentary provided by authors and, in some cases, by readers. An enhanced publication is dynamic in the sense that it may develop across time.

Three critical components are missing from this description. First, the components of an enhanced publication can interconnected in a manner generating value above and beyond conventionally-prepared print-based publications. Second, these objects can be labeled with ‘persistent identifiers’ (see, e.g., Persistent Identifiers for Cultural Heritage) in such a manner that they are traceable in an ever-changing Web environment. And third, publications with such identifiers (consider them scholarly tattoos) can be deposited in specially-designed depots, repositories, where they can be retrieved (e.g.,Social Science Research Network, SSRN).

None of this is particularly new: there are parallels to virtually all of these points in traditional scholarly publishing. Beginning at the end, the term ‘repository’ is a fancy upgrade for what are called (research) libraries, institutions that have for centuries taken very seriously matters of preserving, coding, and providing access to scholarship. Melvil Dewey’s decimal classification system (DDC) is a classic system of coding documents, as is development of so-called metadata succinctly describing the features and content of the ‘tattooed’ texts.

Enhancement of scholarly publications, in short, is complex and much more involved than the skin-deep beauty apparent on an attractive Web site.  It involves a range of features and most of the current initiatives at developing such publications contain only a few of these features. Few, very few publications in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) make their datasets, be they composed of qualitative or quantitative data, available for further, secondary analysis. Initiatives are being undertaken in this direction as illustrated by the mandate and the projects at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), but the stumbling blocks are far from minor: preparation and suitable metadata, copyright restrictions, protection and privacy of respondents. Samuelle Carlson and Ben Anderson review and compare these challenges for different disciplines in their chapter ‘Naming, Documenting and Contributing to e-Science’, published in e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice (and about to be made available on a website complementing this print-based book). See also their article in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (JCMC) ‘What are data?’

Returning to the classical concern between form and content, should we be concerned with the design of the sites for the four books included in the eHumanities Group Enhanced Publications Project or with the content made available on those sites? The simple answer is: both aspects merit attention and both are important, and both form and content interweave into a unified Web presentation of scholarship. Still, in finding somewhere to start the content and its organization takes initial priority over design. That feature will come but does not constitute the point of departure for these sites. First the content and then the dazzle.

SAGE Open

Yesterday, 19 May, SAGE announced publication of the first set of articles in its open access journal SAGE Open. The announcement about the event indicates that these articles represent the initial group of manuscripts accepted for publication from more than 400 submissions since the initiative was announced in January 2011. Such a volume within a four-month period exceeds the number most established titles receive within a year. Combining that volume with the fact that the open access model being used by SAGE Open requires author payment for publication, it appears there are many scholars across the social sciences willing to contribute to an open access journal. SAGE Open benefits, of course, from the reputation of the publisher, but the other common conventions of journal status, like ranking in the Web of Science and an acceptably high impact factor, are absent.

Very much present is accessibility of the published material available in different forms, depending on the interests of the reader. There is the conventional pdf file format, which is often used for printing a copy. In addition, SAGE Open provides a so-called ‘Full Text’ format that includes a range of increasingly standard forms of manuscript enhancement in a Web environment: pop-up windows of bibliographic entries when the cursor glides over in-text references, hot hyperlinks, tables and figures that can be opened in separate windows.

Another type of enhancement with which SAGE is experimenting in this and other titles in its stable of journals is search capability of the keywords assigned to an article. Clicking on a keyword results in a list of hits where that keyword appears in articles published in other SAGE journals. On those topics where this publisher has a larger number of titles, such as social science research methodology, this search feature can be helpful during the early stages of literature identification.

Enhancement and enrichment

There are other variations to enhancement conceivable and it will be interesting to watch whether these are rolled out as the journal becomes established. Based on this initial set of articles, however, it does not seem that SAGE will be following the more radical initiative by Elsevier, what that publisher called the ‘Article of the Future’ at the time of launch nearly two years ago in July 2009. That approach to journal article enhancement has become, as announced early this year, the standard among the score of biology journals in the stable of Cell Press, a subsidiary of Elsevier. It would be interesting to compare the two approaches to enhancement and the rationales by the publishers for including different kinds of enhancement. Much of the variation can probably be attributed to the cultural differences between biology as a discipline, well within the domain of the natural sciences, and a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences that have more affiliation with scholarship in the humanities. In a sense, the approach to enhanced publishing may be reflective of the thesis C. P. Snow sketched in The Two Cultures, more than five decades ago, then suggesting a schism nearly unbreachable between these two domains of scholarship.

Enhancement of scholarship, be that in the sciences or the humanities, probably should be distinguished from enrichment of scholarship, which is what the Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries (JALC) is striving to achieve with functionalities in its open access web-based articles that extend far beyond pop-up windows. This distinction was  persuasively argued yesterday during a presentation at an eHumanities Group (eHg) colloquium by Jeroen Sondervan, editor at Amsterdam University Press (AUP) and publisher of JALC. In that journal, enlargement and rotation of the

maps of archaeological digs and availability of datasets from research projects provide features to a scholarly publication inadequately suggested by ‘enhancement’. Such enrichment, especially as achieved through linking publications to datasets, is the really interesting next level of innovation in publishing, and a more deserving candidate for the label ‘Article of the Future’ than what either SAGE or Elsevier have thus far brought to the table.

Court injunction

The good news about SAGE Open is countered by a dark and ominous court action involving the publisher of this venture, SAGE, together with two arch-conservative university publishing houses, Oxford and Cambridge, regarding alleged copyright infringement at Georgia State University. A wide range of observers consider it ‘A nightmare scenario for higher education’ because of the far-reaching restrictions the injunction may bring should the court ruling be favorable to the plaintiffs. An avalanche of blog reactions have ensued in the few days since the injunction was filed on 16 May and one composed by Hoyner at Outside the Beltway described the action in strikingly harsh terms:

This thuggish tactic of bringing lawsuits and demanding damages or restrictions that are wildly absurd has become en vogue in recent years by those seeking to protect copyrights. The intent, rather transparently, is to frighten the defendants and cow them into settlements rather than take the risk of such crippling damages being awarded.

As bizarre and outrageous as this all is in the context of blogging and the like, it’s mindboggling in the case of academic use of scholarly journals. That’s the purest case of Fair Use.

In another post, Why Open Access is Imperative to Teaching, the author predicts:

If what the publishers want come to pass, there would be even more intense restriction, almost completely wiping out fair use, and practically criminalizing how professors give out reading assignments.

It should be clear that some publishers are antagonistic at best to the needs of academics, not providing them with a service. And that handing over to publishers our copyrights is against everyone’s best interest.

This court action illustrates that enlightened initiatives like SAGE Open are all too often accompanied by contradictory initiatives that dampen a spirit of openness in scholarship. The duality serves as reminder of a basic concern shared by most publishers across the spectrum, commercial and university-affiliated: retention of control of scholarship through restricted access to and use by the members of the scholarly community from which that scholarship emerges.  There is a ‘way out’ from such repressiveness, but the necessary course of action is far more radical than suggested by initiatives at enhancement and by ‘Article of the Future’ proclamations. That solution requires a break with and boycott of publishers repressive in policy and action. That  involves a move toward political action in defense of openness in scholarship by members of a community affiliated with institutions – colleges, universities, research centers – conservative in nature, much as the body of publishers involved in restricting access…and that is the difficulty and, at the same time, the dilemma.

Is Amazon, with an initiative launched in late April called The Backstory, entering the business of enhanced publishing, as suggested in a TechCrunch story? That story, pasted below, notes that the online retailer is adding a range of features to publications it is releasing in e-book format, including author interviews, podcasts and general background information related to the main publication. These are often components of an enhanced publication, and are also found in some of the SURF projects associated with enhancing scholarship. But that is about where the similarity ends. Amazon is not concerned about interrelating the various components – the text, the interviews, background. These elements are instead seen as promotional fluff rather than intertwined elements at understanding the argument of an author. A bookstore, even one as all-encompassing as Amazon, is not concerned with contributing to the central objectives of scholarship and the enhancement of scholarly publications by interlinking the threads of such an enterprise. So, there is certainly reason to be curious about what this book retailer does, but there is no basis for shouting halieua at what is little more than an initiative to sell more products….

The TechCrunch story on Backstory

Amazon has launched a new content hub for its Books area, called The Backstory. The content destination includes interviews with authors, guest reviews, authors’ favorite playlists, recipes, podcasts, essays and more.

Amazon is also debuting “Author Interviews@Amazon,” as part of the launch which is a new author interview series. Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef Tom Douglas, Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Amazon says that new author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions on these pages for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview.

WHat’s interesting about The Backstory is that Amazon is clearly trying to become more than just a destination to buy books. By providing features like Author video interviews Amazon is bringing high-quality content to its platform, alongside e-commerce. And via the ties with Facebook and the company’s blog, Amazon aims to create a community around its content. I’m curious if Amazon will extend this strategy to other e-commerce verticals (i.e. fashion, gadgets).