Can links become the new publishing model
for the Web?
The Open Journal approach
Steve Hitchcock
Open Journal
project
Multimedia Research Group
University of Southampton
email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
The Open Journal project is funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of
its Electronic Libraries Programme
(eLib).
This presentation was given at Multimedia in science: the annual workshop of
German scientific societies held on 3-5 March 1997 at Wuerzburg, Germany.
It consists of a series of Powerpoint slides prepared
for the talk.
This is a text-only, single document version of the same presentation, for
ease of downloading,
with links to those slides that can only be presented as figures.
This version posted on the Web 5th March 1997
Slide 1 Title slide
Slide 2 Aims of the talk
- to indicate what online journal publishers are doing
- consider the online user's view
- argue that collections of links can become a publishable commodity
- show how links are being applied in the Open Journal project
SECTION 1 What journal publishers are doing online
Slide 3 The number of UK journal
publishers on the
Web: a simple summary table
Slide 4 Why publishers are now
prepared to put journals online
- Ability to deliver page facsimiles (pdf): little change in identity
- Can adopt familiar subscription model (site licence, print-plus models)
- Systems now available to handle subscription transactions online (e.g.
ICL COMMANDS)
In 1997 most journal agents will offer subscriptions to online
journals
Slide 5 A question about online
journal publishing
What is the difference between a typical Web page and pages from an online
journal?
Slide 7 The transition to online
journals: Contradiction 1
Originally cautious, journal publishers are now rushing to be online, while
many of the early commercial Web sites
are becoming disillusioned with the revenue-earning potential.
SECTION 2 The online user's view
Slide 8 The journal user's view:
exploding a common myth
Myth The academic 'publish or perish' syndrome has resulted in an
information explosion of unread journal articles
Reality The average amount of reading by university scientists
appears to be increasing
(150 readings per year in 1977 to about 190 in recent surveys)
Slide 9 Scientists who read more
are more productive!
... and perform their work better. Award winners read far more on average
than others.
Slide 10 But... our ability to
access journal materials is deteriorating
What has changed dramatically is that scientists read far more from
library-provided journals, while at the same time libraries are reducing
their journal
collections by relying more on interlibrary loan and document delivery
services.
Slides 8-10 Ref. Tenopir and King, 1996, Setting the
record straight on journal publishing: myth vs. reality. Library
Journal, March 15, 32-35
Slide 11 The transition to online
journals: Contradiction 2
The serials crisis at worst leads to journal cancellations, at best is a
problem of perception for publishers.
With notable exceptions (e.g. Academic Press' IDEAL), the online journal
publishing models fail to address this
perception and do not attack issues of both pricing and access.
Slide 12 Access to journals
(traditional library model)
- bibliographic information (TOCs?)
- indexing and abstracting
- full-text
Ref. Woodward and McKnight, 1995, Electronic journals:
issues of access and biliographical control. Serials Review 21
(20), 71-78
Slide 13 Access to online
journals (traditional plus Web model)
- bibliographic information
- indexing and abstracting
- search engines
- personal alert and customisation
- Web library catalogues
- advanced database querying
- intelligent agents
- metadata
- Links
Slide 14 The transition to online
journals: Contradiction 3
The Web tools for accessing online journals essentially support data
integration, but pdf journals are primarily designed to be printed out.
Slide 15 A brief historical
perspective: some famous quotes
'The human mind ... operates by association ... of thoughts, in accordance
with some intricate web of trails ... the intricacy of trails, the detail of
mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature'
Vannevar Bush, As we may think, 1945
'The medium is the message'
'We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us'
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
Slide 16 Current examples of
journal citation linking
- Biomedical: links to Medline abstracts, e.g. BioMedNet
- Physics: links to Los Alamos e-print archive, e.g. American Physical
Society; links to Inspec abstracts, e.g. Institute of Physics
- Astronomy: links to the Astrophysics Data System, e.g. American
Astronomical Society
Slide 17 Three questions for
publishers of online journal publishers
- Can their preferred formats support access tools for the Web model?
- Can they control content in this environment?
- Can publishers provide journals that are accessible, interactive and
connected?
Slide 18 Answering our earlier
question about online journal publishing
What is the difference between a typical Web page and pages from an
online journal?
E-journals have relatively few links because
1. Links are treated as an authoring activity
2. It is difficult to manage links as a publishing activity
SECTION 3 Applying links: the Open Journal approach
Slide 19 Separating the tasks of
link authoring and link publishing
- Authoring - content creation
- Publishing - link creation
Use a link service - we are using the Distributed Link Service,
also being developed at Southampton University -
to manage links separately from content.
Slide 20 An Open Journal
framework: what we are doing
- Integrating journal resources
- Citation linking
- Editorial linking
- Link management
- Publisher link services
'Bringing journals alive on the World Wide Web'
Slide 21 Publishers participating
in the Open Journal project
- Academic Press
- American Psychological Association (partner Stevan Harnad)
- The British Computer Society
- Cambridge University Press (partner Stevan Harnad)
- The Company of Biologists Ltd
- Electronic Press Ltd
- Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
- MCB University Press
- Oxford University Press
- John Wiley & Sons
Slide 22 Three Open Journals in
development: an overview
- Cognitive science Citation linking, Psycoloquy to (an
extracted) ISI database of abstracts
- Computer science Identifying links between disparate journals
and other relatively disorganised resources
- Biology Links between closely related journals on cell biology
and a rich collection of external
resources, e.g. dictionary, molecular databases
Slide 23 What is 'open' about an
Open Journal?
- Multimedia - integrates different media types, e.g. text, graphics,
video, audio
- Hypertext - separates link data from document data
The defining feature is speed of access and maximum interconnectedness
between disparate resources
Slide 24 Where is the 'journal'
in an Open Journal?
- Collected resources - journals, books, citation services, databases,
lecture notes.....
- A document collection - e-print archive, refereed papers
The 'journal' is bound not by the glue and cover of a paper product, but
by a set of links stored in a link database
Slide 25 Features of a link
service
- Links created by author, reader, publisher with mouse clicks or forms
interface (in development)
- Can superimpose links on third-party data - no dead-ends
- Multiple link destinations
- Generic links - generates large numbers of links, automatically updates
when new data is published
- Link data held separately from document data
Slide 26 A (very) brief
chronology of link services (1989- )
1989 Link service concept introduced by Sun Microsystems
1989... Open hypertext research systems: e.g. Microcosm, Hyper-G,
Multicard, Hyperbase
1994 Commercial version of Microcosm
1995 Commercial version of Hyper-G
1996 Link services for the Web, HyperWave (built from Hyper-G),
Distributed Link Service (based on Microcosm)
SECTION 4 Example: an Open Journal in biology
(Note. These slides can be shown as graphic slides only)
SECTION 5 Conclusions
Slide 39 Applying the
conventional publishing model to online journals
The traditional paper version is the version of record; digital
technology is used to provide added value
For: familiar, much as things are now
Against: economics of paper; incompatible media; not the choice of
users
Slide 40 An Open Journal view of
what online 'journals' may become
- The Web (or a successor) will be the first point of access for research
information
- Features of an Open Journal will be speed, accessibility, interactivity
and multimedia integration
- New authoring styles will evolve based on non-sequential, linked structures
- Paper publications will be highly selective
Slide 41 Open Journal research
credits
Southampton University
Project management, link services, publishing
Prof. Wendy Hall
Les Carr
Steve Harris
Steve Hitchcock
Nottingham University
Acrobat applications
Prof. David Brailsford
Steve Probets
David Evans
How to contact us: email Steve
Hitchcock sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Web page http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
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