Scholar-based innovations in publishing. Part II: library and professional initiatives

Citation

McKiernan, G. (2003), "Scholar-based innovations in publishing. Part II: library and professional initiatives", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920caf.004

Scholar-based innovations in publishing. Part II: library and professional initiatives

Gerry McKiernan

Scholar-based innovations in publishing. Part II: library and professional initiatives

Over the past several years, a variety of initiatives have emerged that seek to provide alternatives to a predominant publishing paradigm that is focused more on profit than on the broad dissemination of scholarship. In a previous review, select individual and institutional alternative publishing options were described; in this profile, major library and professional efforts are explored.

Library

DSpace™ at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

DSpace™ (dspace.org) is a "newly-developed digital repository [originally] created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output" of faculty and staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Barton, 2002; Smith 2002a, b; Smith et al., 2003). DSpace is organized to accommodate the multidisciplinary and organizational needs of a large institution and can provide access to the digital intellectual assets of an entire institution. It accepts not only text submissions, but images, audio, and video as well. Among the types of resources it can accommodate are:

• •

  articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers;

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  books;

• •

  theses;

• •

  data sets;

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  computer programs; and

• •

  visual simulations and models.

At MIT, DSpace is organized into "Communities" and "Collections" (http://hpds1.mit.edu/index.jsp). Currently, the following communities (e.g. Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development (CTPID)) and collections (e.g. Cooperative Mobility Program, Ford-MIT Alliance, International Motor Vehicle Program) are available:

1. 1.

   Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development (CTPID):

2. 2.
   • •

     CTPID archive;

   • •

     cooperative mobility program;

   • •

     Ford-MIT alliance;

   • •

     international motor vehicle program;

   • •

     labor aerospace research agenda;

   • •

     lean aerospace initiative;

   • •

     lean sustainment initiative;

   • •

     materials systems laboratory;

   • •

     program on Internet and telecoms convergence;

   • •

     program on science, technology, and environmental policy;

   • •

     technology and law program.

3. 3.

   Department of ocean engineering:

4. 4.
   • •

     design project reports;

   • •

     ocean engineering collection.

5. 5.

   Laboratory for information and decision systems (LIDS):

6. 6.
   • •

     LIDS technical reports.

7. 7.

   MIT Press:

8. 8.
   • •

     MIT Press out-of-print books.

9. 9.

   Sloan School of Management:

10. 10.
    • •

      Sloan working papers.

The entire MIT DSpace repository can be browsed by title, author, or date, as can all resources associated with an individual community, or single constituent collection (see Figure 1). Entries displayed in a title or date browse for a community or collection will include the title, author(s), and the "Date of Issue"; the author browse will provide an alphabetical author listing without title or date. In any browse, all entries are hyperlinked to a brief record for the item, which includes its title, author(s), assigned keywords, issue date, abstract, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and collection identifier. The names of associated files, their size, and format are listed beneath the record data. The associated file can be retrieved by clicking on the "View/Open" link found in the lower right-hand side of the display (see Figure 1). The full record can be displayed in the Dublin Core format (dublincore.org) by clicking on "Show full item record" (Note: DSpace uses a qualified version of the Dublin Core scheme). DSpace can also be searched, either globally or within an individual community or constituent collection.

Figure 1 The brief record in Dspace™ provides the publication title, author(s), assigned keywords, issue date, abstract, URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and collection identifier

Currently, the MIT Libraries offers a "Basic Service" to users, with plans for a Premium Service in the future. Core Services and Management Services comprise the Basic Service. "DSpace Core Services offer a fully functional system that allows DSpace Community members to accomplish all tasks necessary to submit, preserve, and access items in DSpace. Additionally, MIT Libraries provides Management Services to establish and deliver ongoing support for DSpace Communities, respond to customer inquiries, and supply system monitoring, back-up, and recovery. Services beyond those in the DSpace Basic Service offering will be offered through the DSpace Premium Services and may be offered on a fee-for-service basis" (DSpace, 2002).

Detailed instructions are available to assist the user in browsing, searching, submitting, and interfacing with DSpace. Currently a wide variety of document (e.g. .pdf, .xml, .htm) and graphic formats (.gif, .png, .tif) are accepted, or are "known" but currently not yet formally "supported" (e.g. .doc, .ppt, .xls; au, mov, .ram).

In 2002, MIT formed collaborative partnerships with several other academic research institutions in the USA, Canada, and the UK, to investigate specific questions concerning DSpace, such as:

• •

  What will it take to successfully deploy the system at another institution?

• •

  How much localization, how much customization, and how much time and effort are needed?

• •

  What services can be defined to leverage the digital collections of these institutions, and how can they be implemented in DSpace?

• •

  What sort of organization will the Federation become: A consortium? A new membership organization? An informal and loose collaboration? Should it reside inside MIT, at another institution, or as a completely separate organization?

The official DSpace Federation partners include Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester (NY), the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington:

• •

  In early November 2002, the DSpace software was released and is available free-of-charge from SourceForce™ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/). DSpace at MIT is a registered "Data Provider" with the Open Archives Initiative (http://openarchives.org). Since its public release, there have been more than 1,500 downloads of the DSpace software.

DSpace is a collaborative project between the MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, funded in part by a $1.8 million grant from the computer manufacturer. Through its ongoing strategic alliance with MIT, Hewlett-Packard has funded SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments), a research project that will seek "to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata, metadata, and services" (DSpace, n.d.).

E-Print Repository (Australian National University Library)

In September 2001, the Scholarly Information Services unit of the Australian National University (ANU), under the direction of the then University Librarian, Colin Steele, established the E-Print Repository (eprints.anu.edu.au/index.html). The intent of this project is to provide ANU with "an electronic archive of research literature [as well as] a framework … [that] will ultimately allow for the retention and distribution of research literature outside the multinational publishers." For the longer term, it is hoped that the initiative will provide the basis for "a dramatic changing of the mechanism for scholarly communication" (Steele, n.d.). Indeed, the E-Print Repository is part of a broader national initiative undertaken by the Standing Committee on Information Policy (SCIP) of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC). This initiative aimed to:

• •

  improve economics in scholarly communications;

• •

  improve accessibility to the work of Australian scholars;

• •

  enhance access and contribution to internationally linked scholarship;

• •

  increase awareness of Australian research; and

• •

  create an archive of the publications produced at individual institutions.

Resources made available within the ANU Repository can be browsed by the following broad and subordinate subject categories.

The broad subject categories available for browsing in the ANU e-print repository are listed as follows:

• •

  Arts.

• •

  Astronomy and astrophysics.

• •

  Biological sciences.

• •

  Business and economics.

• •

  Chemistry.

• •

  Electronic publishing.

• •

  Engineering.

• •

  Environmental sciences.

• •

  Humanities.

• •

  Law.

• •

  Medicine.

• •

  Physical sciences and mathematics.

• •

  Social sciences.

Subordinate categories in the "Engineering" subject category in the ANU Repository are listed as follows:

• •

  Aeronautics.

• •

  Applied mathematics.

• •

  Applied physics.

• •

  Astronautics.

• •

  Biomedical engineering.

• •

  Chemical engineering.

• •

  Civil engineering.

• •

  Computer science.

• •

  Electrical engineering.

• •

  Environment.

• •

  Industrial engineering.

• •

  Mechanical engineering.

• •

  Technology.

• •

  Telecommunications.

In addition to serving the interest of the local institution, the ANU repository has also served as a model to encourage the establishment of e-print repositories by Australian universities. In late Spring 2002, Colin Steele, now Director of Scholarly Information Strategies at ANU, and Lorena Kanellopoulos, Electronic Publishing and Marketing Unit, ANU Library, visited the member institutions that comprise the Group of Eight Universities (Go8) (Australia) to promote the creation and use of repositories. As a result, the University of Queensland has prepared a business plan to develop a service, and Monash University has commissioned a study on establishing an "E-Press" (similar "E-Press" projects are also under consideration by the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and ANU). Such activity has stimulated the establishment of the Systematic Infrastructure Committee of the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science, and Training (Australia), which has recommended that the development of e-print repositories be given high priority for funding.

The ANU E-Print Repository is a local implementation of the ePrints.org Open Archive software (v. 1.1.1 (23/01/2001)) available free-of-charge from http://eprints.org. As a version of the software used in CogPrints (cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk), the institutional repository (see Figure 2) can be searched using the identical search options offered in that service. Like CogPrints, the E-Prints Repository provides two broad types of searching: "Simple" and "Advanced".

Figure 2 The viewing and user services options offered by the Australian National University E-Print Repository

In a "Simple" search, users can search by title, abstract, or keyword(s) concurrently, and/or by author, and/or by publication year. A search statement can be limited using a Boolean function statement, or by publication year(s). Search results can be displayed in order by the first author's last name, alphabetically by title, or in chronological or reverse chronological order. In the "Advanced" search, the user can separately search by title keyword, author, abstract keyword, or general keyword, using the Boolean functions statements offered in a "Simple" search. In addition, by selecting from a drop-down menu, a search can be limited to one or more "Subject Categories". A search can also be limited by type of publication (e.g. "Book Chapter", "Conference Paper", "Preprint", "Thesis", etc.) and/or conference title, author departmental affiliation, editor name(s), or institution. In addition, a search can be restricted to items that are "Unpublished", "In Press", or "Published", and/or to those that are refereed or non-refereed. Identical display options available are provided in a "Simple" search.

University of Michigan University Library Scholarly Publishing Office

The University of Michigan University Library Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) (http//:spo.umdl.umich.edu) is a unit of the University of Michigan Library responsible for developing and providing tools and methods for the electronic publication and distribution of scholarly content. This unit supports "the traditional constructs of journal and monographic publication in an online environment, as well as publishing scholarly work expressly designed for electronic delivery." Overall, it exists "to develop services that are responsive to the needs of both producers and users, to foster a better economic model for campus publishing, to support local control of intellectual assets, and to create highly functional scholarly resources."

Its current goals and priorities include:

• •

  low-cost, scalable mechanisms for electronic publication and distribution of journals and monographs, including issuing material in conventional forms (i.e. periodic issuing of journals, monographs that are linear narratives and that are distributed in editions), and enhancing these through hyperlinking, or the addition of multimedia elements;

• •

  mechanisms for publication and distribution of scholarly digital projects that extend traditional publication into new forms of scholarly expression;

• •

  tools for managing electronic publications, including electronic tools for supporting peer review;

• •

  business and pricing models for sustaining university-based publishing activity;

• •

  electronic commerce mechanisms for electronic publications;

• •

  consultation services for faculty and library staff who wish to create scholarly electronic projects that may draw on the library's digital collections or its publishing services or capabilities;

• •

  assisting authors to understand available services and options, as well as their role in bringing the projects to fruition; and

• •

  exploration of opportunities to package and disseminate library collections.

The SPO has also assumed responsibility for managing the Library's role in the History E-Book Project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a project which is intended "to assist scholars in the electronic publishing of monographs in history, to help assure the continued viability of the history monograph in today's changing publishing environment, and to explore the intellectual possibilities of new technologies" (University of Michigan University Library, Scholarly Publishing Office, n.d.,b). In addition, SPO also "monitors campus concerns and questions concerning electronic publication and dissemination of scholarship and works to address those concerns … " (University of Michigan University Library, Scholarly Publishing Office, n.d.,a).

The Scholarly Publishing Office is also in "the process of developing or acquiring a number of software tools to support the publication process that it will make available to its publishing partners," including:

• •

  support for peer review and authorial submission. SPO plans to provide Web-based support for article submission and for management of the peer review process;

• •

  a journal management system that will allow journal editors to submit articles and their associated bibliographic data for online publication (see Figure 3); and

• •

  journal issue building tools that will allow editors to create and manage a set of articles so that they appear in the context of an issue.

Figure 3 The Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) "Journal Management System'' allows journal editors to submit articles, and their associated bibliographic data, for online publication

Professional

SPARC – The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is "an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations" that seeks to serve "as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment …" (SPARC, 2002a).

Currently, there are approximately 200 institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, which are either full, domestic and international supporting, or consortial members of SPARC. SPARC itself is also affiliated with major library organizations in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, and North America, and has been endorsed by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Big 12 Provosts, the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (UK). In addition, there are several dozen European sponsoring organizations and research libraries that are members of SPARC Europe.

Since its launch in June 1998, SPARC has, among other activities, demonstrated that "new journals can successfully compete for authors and quickly establish quality," at a reasonable cost for personal and institutional subscribers. In addition, SPARC has stimulated "the development of increased publishing capacity in the not-for-profit sector," thus encouraging "new players to enter the market"; and provided assistance and guidance to scientists and librarians interested in "creating change" (SPARC, 2002a). In this arena, SPARC has sought publishing partners that "are committed to fair pricing, intellectual property management policies that emphasize broad and easy distribution and reuse of material, and the ethical use of scholarly resources." SPARC has encouraged collaborations through three major initiatives: SPARC Alternatives Program, SPARC Leading Edge Program, and the SPARC Scientific Communities.

The SPARC Alternatives Program "encourages and supports projects that represent a direct and strong competitive alternative to existing high-priced titles in important established … [scientific, technical, and medical (STM)] fields." The program is also intended "to provide editors and authors with responsive, credible options for lessening their publishing dependence on the established journals in a particular field where control is often exercised by a relatively few dominant for-profit publishers" (SPARC, n.d.,a). Current SPARC alternatives include Algebraic and Geometric Topology (www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/), Crystal Growth and Design (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/cgdefu/index.html), Evolutionary Ecology Research (www.evolutionary-ecology.com), Geochemical Transactions (www.rsc.org/is/journals/current/geochem/geopub.htm), Geometry and Topology (www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/), IEEE Sensors Journal (www.ewh.ieee.org/tc/sensors/Sensors_journal.htm), Journal of Machine Learning (www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/), Journal of Vegetation Science (www.opuluspress.se), Organic Letters (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/orlef7/index.html), PhysChemComm (www.rsc.org/is/journals/current/physchemcomm/pccpub.htm), and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (www.cwi.nl/projects/alp/TPLP/tplp.html).

The SPARC Leading Edge Program "encourages and supports projects that represent a paradigm shift in technology use, introduce an innovative business model, and/or meet the scholarly and research information needs of an emerging or fast-growing STM field" (SPARC, n.d.,b). Current SPARC Leading Edge initiatives include BioMedCentral (www.biomedcentral.com), Documenta Mathematica (http://hematik.uni-bielefeld.de/documenta/Welcome-eng.html), Internet Journal of Chemistry (www.ijc.com) (see Figure 4), Journal of Insect Science (www.insectscience.org), and the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org).

Figure 4 The Internet Journal of Chemistry is a SPARC Leading Edge e-journal

The SPARC Scientific Communities partnerships "recognize the importance of building new outlets for scientific communication around the broad information needs of the communities of users they serve. The program supports development of non-profit information aggregations or portals that serve specified scientific communities by providing high-quality, reasonably priced access peer-reviewed research and other needed content from a variety of sources or publishers" (SPARC, n.d.,c). Current SPARC Scientific Communities include BioOne (www.BioOne.org), Columbia Earthscape (www.earthscape.org), eScholarship (http://escholarship.cdlib.org), Figaro (www.figaro-europe.net), MIT CogNet (http://cognet.mit.edu), and Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Home).

To assist those considering alternatives to the current predominant scholarly publishing paradigm, SPARC provides a resource page of "software tools and suites for publishing and managing online journals, archives, and repositories" (SPARC, 2002b). In addition, SPARC offers an "Institutional Repositories" resource page that provides a listing of key topical SPARC publications, relevant SPARC-sponsored workshops, and a link to the SPARC Institutional Repositories electronic discussion list (SPARC-IR@arl.org). The parent body of SPARC, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) (www.aorl.org) also offers a resource page that provides a hyperlinked list of significant sources that relate to the Open Access movement as well as to a Web site and useful booklet.

Rick Johnson and Alison Buckholtz currently serve as the Enterprise Director and Associate Director of SPARC, respectively, while Julia Blixrud serves as the SPARC Assistant Director for Public Programs, and Raym Crow as a Senior Consultant.

ELSSS – The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists

The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS) (www.elsss.org.uk) is "a not-for-profit organisation aimed at solving the ever-deepening crisis in scholarly and scientific communication created by the pricing policies of some commercial publishers … " ELSSS is committed to:

• •

  increasing "competition in the academic journal-publishing marketplace by providing direct and credible alternatives to specific high-priced journals; and

• •

  introducing a fairer and more efficient way of producing, distributing, and using academic journals in which the current commercial publishing paradigm is replaced by a mechanism that yields lowest-cost access and widest dissemination by rewarding … those individuals who contribute to making high-quality journals, namely, authors, referees, and editors … (and which results in) … substantial savings for libraries and the academic and student community" (ELSSS, 2002).

Succinctly, ELSSS envisages:

• •

  … a new concept of scholarly and scientific journal: conceived and managed by academics themselves; aimed at providing direct competition to high-priced commercial publications; based on a business model whereby subscription revenues cover the non-trivial cost of peer-review; designed to maximise research productivity; intended as a platform for scientific and scholarly debate.

ELSSS was launched in November 2000 as "an innovative solution" to the "serials crisis", the rapid and substantial increase in journal subscription prices that far exceed the level of institutional library support for journal subscriptions (La Manna and Young, 2002). Specifically, "ELSSS aims to provide head-to-head competition to named high-price commercially-produced journals in the social sciences generally, and in economics" (La Manna and Young, 2002, p. 178).

The core component of the ELSSS strategy to replace high-priced journal titles is to "reward all the key elements of the journal as a means of diffusing peer-reviewed high-quality research, chiefly authors, referees, [and] editors." To attract the highest quality submissions, ELSSS plans to offer:

• •

  high level quality control: only submissions that match or exceed the quality of ELSSS competition will be accepted for publication;

• •

  a significantly shorter submission-to-decision time-lag;

• •

  a wider readership and higher impact; and

• •

  an "opportunity to interact with fellow academics in ways not offered by high-priced journals" (see below).

Concomitantly, ELSSS seeks to bolster the reputation of its journals by the recruitment and appointment of "world-class" editors. "To entice overworked referees to provide full and prompt reports, ELSSS … [plans to] reward them not only with new forms of peer recognition, but also with modest but not insignificant honoraria" (La Manna and Young, 2002, p. 179) (see also Figure 5).

In addition to its plan to provide stipends to its editors, ELSSS is developing the ELSSS Publishing Template (EPT) that will simplify and automate much of the "administrative burden of editing" (see below). As described, the EPT is a "fully integrated state-of-the-art software package for the editing, production, distribution, and archiving of a truly electronic journal" that includes the following features:

• •

  author- and referee-friendly electronic submission and manuscript tracking;

• •

  varied publication options (brief synopsis, extended synopsis, media briefing (if appropriate), electronic and print full version, and/or extended version (e.g. additional appendices, datasets, extensive proofs, etc.);

• •

  interactivity (e.g. author e-mail, dedicated discussion forum, formal mediated comments, etc.);

• •

  citation and download tracking;

• •

  free access for all universities and research centers in developing and transition economies;

• •

  long-term archiving; and

• •

  full compliance with Open Archive Initiative (www.openarchives.org) standards.

Figure 5 An online form facilitates referee registration for The Review of Economic Theory, an ELSSS journal

Articles published in ELSSS journals can be regarded as "being an intermediate stage in the scholarly communication process in that, having passed the peer-review test, they are available to a wide readership to comment on, and interact with … " The EPT has several novel features that:

• •

  … facilitate and foster scientific debate on the research material published in its journals. These range from basic e-mail exchanges to more sophisticated forms of discussion platforms. One interesting feature of this interactivity section is that readers can build up a post-publication evaluation profile for each article, both indirectly through hits and downloads, and directly by means of a report form that allows them to rank the article according to a number of criteria (La Manna and Young, 2002, p. 180).

• •

  By making full use of the possibilities offered by the Web, ELSSS "journals" will allow scholars and scientists to communicate on a world-wide basis (if required, in real time) in both open and closed communities of interested parties.

The first ELSSS journal, The Review of Economic Theory, is scheduled to begin publication in early 2003. In addition, the following ELSSS journals are currently planned:

• •

  ELSSS Review of Banking and Finance.

• •

  ELSSS Development Economics.

• •

  ELSSS Review of Economic Organization and Behavior.

• •

  ELSSS Review of Economic Dynamics and Control.

• •

  ELSSS Review of Financial Economics.

• •

  ELSSS Review of International Economic Theory and Policy.

• •

  ELSSS Review of Mathematical Economics.

• •

  ELSSS European Economic Journal.

• •

  ELSSS Journal of Research & Policy Development.

As of June 2002, ELSSS had the support of more than 1,000 research economists worldwide that range from Nobel laureates to junior academics. ELSSS receives institutional and financial support from the Royal Economic Society, the University of St Andrews, and Scottish Enterprise Fife, the major economic development agency of Scotland.

ELSSS was developed from an original concept by Manfredi La Manna, Reader in Economics, University of St Andrews, with the assistance of Dr Julian Crowe, Senior Computer Technician, University of St Andrews, and Ms Cate Newton, Director of General Collections at the National Library of Scotland, and former Associate Librarian, the University of St Andrews. The ELSSS Publishing Template (EPT) is being developed by Mr Bram Boskamp, Computer Officer, University of St Andrews.

The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities

The Stoa (www.stoa.org) is a Web-based publishing forum for the Humanities. Its goals are to:

• •

  foster a new style of refereed scholarly publications in the humanities of interest not only to specialists but also to public audiences;

• •

  develop and refine new models for scholarly collaboration via the Internet;

• •

  assist in the long-term interoperability and archival availability of electronic materials; and

• •

  support resolutions to copyright and other issues as they arise in the course of scholarly electronic publication.

In general, The Stoa can "best be understood as a source of support and coordination for electronic scholarship in the humanities, with a special focus on the ancient world and the classical tradition"; more technically, it can be described as a "refereed collaborative publication of structured data for wide audiences" (Stoa Consortium, 1998a) (see Figure 6). The vision of Stoa is to establish a "new paradigm of peer-reviewed publishing in the humanities, buoyed by new models of scholarly collaboration, and using recognized standards, such as TEI-conformant SGML, XML, the DOI, and Unicode" (Myrick, 2000).

Figure 6 One of the major goals of The Stoa is to foster a new style of refereed scholarly publications in the humanities for specialists and the public alike

From The Stoa perspective, the accessibility of scholarly materials to public audiences can be enhanced in a variety of ways, most notably by:

• •

  an initial outline, overview, or abstract of the author's argument or purposes, supplemented by waypoints within the document itself;

• •

  clear, concise, organized, well-written presentations;

• •

  appropriate hyperlinks to electronic resources that offer essential explanations, background information, or supporting data; and

• •

  use of multimedia components such as images, maps, diagrams and other drawings, sound files, QuickTime clips, Virtual Reality Mark-up Language (VRML models), etc.

The Stoa operates under the primary direction of two editors, Anne Mahoney (Tufts University) and Ross Scaife (University of Kentucky). Members of an Advisory Board assist the editors on general questions of policy; when necessary the advice and opinions of specialists are also sought. In addition, some Stoa Consortium projects have developed their own review processes. All scholarship submitted to the editorial board of The Stoa is evaluated according to three broad criteria, namely the quality and importance of the work from a disciplinary perspective, its accessibility to a wide audience, and the "consistency with the technical considerations advanced by this consortium" (Stoa Consortium, 1998c). Among the publication types planned are monographs, primary sources, translations, and encyclopedias, as well as interactive geographic resources, and archaeological databases.

As of May 2002, a number of projects were available from The Stoa, and include:

• •

  Household and City Organization at Olynthus (www.stoa.org/olynthus/).

• •

  Homeric Questions by Gregory Nagy (http://stoa.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.06.0002)

• •

  Ancient Journeys: Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Numa Lane (www.stoa.org/lane).

• •

  The Iliad by Martin Mueller (www.stoa.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=2000.01.0002).

• •

  í: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World (www.stoa.org/diotima/essays/).

• •

  Trajan's Column (www.stoa.org/trajan/).

• •

  The "Confessions" of Augustine: An Electronic Edition by James J. O'Donnell (www.stoa.org/hippo/).

• •

  Metis; A QTVR Interface for Ancient Archaeological Sites (www.stoa.org/metis).

• •

  Suda online (www.stoa.org/sol/).

In addition to current projects, several others are under development, and include: Dêmos!: Classical Athenian Democracy (www.stoa.org/demos) and The Ancient City of Athens (www.indiana.edu/~kglowack/athens/).

From The Stoa, links to "Best Practices" for the following are also made available:

• •

  A Guide to Recording Hand-held GPS Waypoints.

• •

  A Standardized Method for Producing QTVR Panoramas.

• •

  A Guide to Shooting Architecture, Monuments, Sites, and Topography.

• •

  An Introduction to Structured Mark-up.

• •

  Using the TEI for Epigraphy.

• •

  Unicode and the Display of Polytonic Greek.

Unlike most publishing agreements, individual authors or collaborators of Stoa-associated projects retain rights to their own work. Such work can be republished elsewhere, sold to commercial publishers, or used by other scholars and teachers. The Stoa, however, retains non-exclusive rights to such publications, primarily "to prevent the later withdrawal from the consortium of scholarship on which people have built subsequent links and arguments" and to support its central goals of creating "long-term stability and interoperability" (Stoa Consortium, 1998b).

In addition to local support provided by the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Kentucky, the Stoa Consortium has received support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), as well as a Digital Libraries Initiatives Phase 2 (www.dli2.nsf.gov/) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and funding provided by the joint NSF/European Union International Digital Library Collaborative Research program (www.dli2.nsf.gov/internationalprojects/nsfeu.html) (www.nsf.gov/pubs/1999/nsf996/nsf996.htm), and the College of the Holy Cross and The Perseus Digital Library project (www.perseus.tufts.edu).

Note: This is the second of three eProfiles on scholar-based innovations in publishing. The first in the series focused on individual and institutional initiatives, while the third will profile organizational and national efforts.

References

Barton, M. (2002), "DSpace™", presentation at Institutional Repositories: A Workshop on Creating an Infrastructure for Faculty-Library Partnerships, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC, 18 October, available at: www.arl.org/IR/barton/sld001.htm (accessed 4 January 2003).

DSpace (n.d.), "SMILE overview: semantic interoperability of metadata and information in unLike environments", available at: http://web.mit.edu/dspace-dev/www/simile/resources/overview.html (accessed 4 January 2003).

DSpace (2002), "MIT services", available at: http://dspace.org/mit/services.html (accessed 29 November).

ELSSS (2002), "Review of economic theory", available at: www.elsss.org.uk/?current=Review+of+Economic+Theory (accessed 19 January 2003).

La Manna, M. and Young, J. (2002), "The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists: from journals as documents to journals as knowledge exchanges", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 30 No. 4, p. 178.

Myrick, L. (2000), "The Stoa Consortium", Current Cites, Vol. 11 No. 1, January, available at: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.1.html (accessed 12 January 2003).

Smith, M. (2002a), "Dspace™", presentation at the 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI): Gaining Independence with E-prints Archives and OAI, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 17-19 October, available at: http://doc.cern.ch/AGE/current/askArchive.php?a02333/a02333s13t2/transparencies/MacKenzie_Smith.pdf (accessed 1 December).

Smith, M. (2002b), "DSpace: an institutional repository from the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard laboratories", in Agosti, M. and Thanos, C. (Eds), ECDL 2002: Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 6th European Conference, Rome, Italy, 16-18 September, Springer Verlag, Berlin; NY, pp. 543-9 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2458).

Smith, M., Barton, M., Bass, M., Branschofsky, M., McClellan, G., Stuve, D., Tansley, R. and Walker, J.H. (2003), "DSpace: an open source dynamic digital repository", D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 9 No. 1, January, available at: www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/smith/01smith.html (accessed 18 January).

SPARC (n.d.,a), "SPARC partners. SPARC alternatives", available at: www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=c1 (accessed 10 January 2003).

SPARC (n.d.,b), "SPARC partners. SPARC leading edge", available at: www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=c5 (accessed 10 January 2003).

SPARC (n.d.,c), "SPARC partners. SPARC scientific communities", available at: www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=c3 (accessed 10 January 2003).

SPARC (2002a), "About SPARC", available at: www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=a0 (accessed 10 January 2003).

SPARC (2002b), "Current SPARC members", available at: www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=b1 (accessed 10 January 2003).

Steele, C. (n.d.), "Eprint repository: Preamble", available at: http://eprints.anu.edu.au/eprints_preamble.html (accessed 28 November).

Stoa Consortium (1998a), "Frequently asked questions", available at: www.stoa.org/faq.shtml (accessed 12 January 2003).

Stoa Consortium (1998b), "Legal considerations", available at: www.stoa.org/legal.shtml (accessed 12 January 2003).

Stoa Consortium (1998c), "The process", available at: www.stoa.org/review.shtml (accessed 12 January 2003).

University of Michigan University Library. Scholarly Publishing Office (n.d.,a), "About SPO. Introduction", available at: http://spo.umdl.umich.edu/intro.html (accessed 30 December 2002).

University of Michigan University Library. Scholarly Publishing Office (n.d.,b), "University Library Scholarly Publishing Office, unit goals, FY 2000-01", available at: http://spo.umdl.umich.edu/goals/2001goals.html (accessed 30 December 2002).

Further Reading

American Council of Learned Societies (n.d.), "History e-Book Project", available at: www.historyebook.org (accessed 30 December 2002).

Australian National University, Division of Information, Scholarly Information/Library (2001), "About eprints", available at: http://eprints.anu.edu.au/information.html (accessed 30 November 2002).

Clyde, M. (2000), "HP Labs, MIT Libraries join forces to build 'D Space': scalable, stable digital repository under way at MIT", HPWorld, June, available at: www.hpworld.org/hpworldnews/hpw006/02stor.html (accessed 29 November 2002).

Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (1999), "Current project descriptions 1999", Tufts University, The Stoa Consortium: Broadening the audience for scholarly documents using the World Wide Web, available at: www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/FIPSE/99ProgBk/adCOMPp136.html (accessed 12 January 2003).

La Manna, M. (2002a), "The benefits and challenges of academic-led scholarly and scientific journals: the ELSSS project as a test case", presentation at Libraries for Life: Democracy, Diversity, Delivery, the 68th IFLA General Conference and Council, Glasgow, August 18-24, available at: www.elsss.org.uk/documents/IFLA19Aug2002_2_files/frame.htm (accessed 19 January 2003).

La Manna, M. (2002b), "ELSSS: The Electronic Society for Social Scientists www.elsss.org.uk", presented at The New Information Order and the Future of the Archive, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 20-23 March, available at: www.elsss.org.uk/documents/EDIN_22_03_02.pdf (accessed 19 January 2003).

La Manna, M. (2002c), "The story of ELSSS: a new model of partnership between academics and libraries", presented at New Routes to Scholarly Communication, CURL Task Force on Staffing Resources Event, Chandler House Lecture Theatre G1, University College, London, 11 March, available at: www.elsss.org.uk/documents/CURL_11_03_02.doc (accessed 19 January 2003).

McKiernan, G. (2002a), "E is for everything: the extra-ordinary, evolutionary [e-] journal", The Serials Librarian, Vol. 41 No. 3-4, pp. 293-321, also available at: www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/SLv41n3-4.pdf (accessed 19 January 2003).

McKiernan, G. (2002b), "Web-based journal manuscript management software and systems", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No 7, pp. 31-43, also available at: www.emeraldinsight.com/fm=html/rpsv/cw/mcb/07419058/v19n7/s5002/p2l (accessed 11 January 2003).

McKiernan, G. (2003), "Scholar-based innovations in publishing. Part I: Individual and institutional initiatives", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 19-26.

Scaife, R. (n.d.), "Ross Scaife. Primary research interest: collaborative informatics", available at: www.uky.edu/~scaife/ (accessed 12 January 2003).

Steele, C. (2002), "E-prints: the future of scholarly communication?", Incite, November, available at: www.alia.org.au/incite/2002/10/eprints.html (accessed 30 November).

Young, J. (2002), "'Superarchives' could hold all scholarly output", Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 48 No. 43, June, p. A29, available at: http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm (accessed 30 November).

Gerry McKiernan(gerrymck@iastate.edu) is a Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa, USA.