Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
obstacles need to be overcome? How can we get to that future as
quickly as possible, taking the best of the present with us instead of
destroying something now only to reinvent it later?
I am going to restrict myself primarily to a discussion of scientific
journal publishing since that is what I know best, but much of what
follows is, or will become, applicable to other disciplines. Indeed the
issues of discoverability, digital curation and preservation, version
control, provenance and trustworthiness are applicable to all online
content, including scholarly e-books, research data, audio and video
files, news content, etc. In the discussion that follows, I will use the
NISO Journal Article Version recommended practice nomenclature for
article versions, a full explanation of which can be found in NISO
(2008) .
Drivers for change
If scholarly publishing has not undergone a revolution since the mid
1990s, it has certainly undergone a sustained period of intensive
evolution. In many ways journal publishing has been a model industry
in terms of the adoption of new technology, and academic publishers
have embraced the web in a way that few other industries have.
Online delivery
The moves to e-mail correspondence, online submission systems and
web-based tools to facilitate peer review and manuscript tracking have
greatly speeded up the publication process, and these practical
innovations and improvements will continue. However, the online
delivery of content is perhaps the most visible result of the adoption of
internet technologies. In 1995, when the web was still in its infancy, a
handful of journals were available online via rudimentary interfaces - if
you had the patience to download them (even the academic networks
were painfully slow back then).
Spool forward ten years to 2005, by which time 93% of the journals
in science, technology and medicine (STM) and 84% of arts, humanities
and social science (AHSS) journals were available online (Cox and Cox,
2005). By 2008, 96% of STM and 87% of AHSS journals were online
(Cox and Cox, 2008) and they were being delivered by sophisticated
