The Pragmatics of Publishing a Scholarly Electronic Journal

The Pragmatics of Publishing a Scholarly Electronic
Journal

R.
G.
Siemens
Department of English University of
Alberta
Raymond.Siemens@UAlberta.ca

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The computer -- specifically, the recent advance in methods of electronic
dissemination brought forth by recent computing technologies -- has been seen by
some as a saviour to the scholarly publishing world. We need only consider the
intellectual milieu that spawned the collection Scholarly
Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic
Publishing (O'Donnell and Okerson, eds.) some years ago, in 1995, to
recognize this. The idea of the "subversive proposal" around which that
collection was constructed was put forward several years earlier by Stevan
Harnad, editor of the electronic journal Psycholoquy;
given voice by many since its presentation, the subversive proposal is
essentially this: instead of sending articles and book manuscripts to
traditional academic journals and publishers, scholars should distribute their
work free via the internet through electronic journals and scholar-managed
archives.
Combined with advances in computing technology and infrastructure, as well as
what we might refer to as the ongoing "technologising of the reader," such
thinking has caused a fundamental shift in focus of discussions surrounding
scholarly publishing in the electronic medium. On the whole, discussion on this
topic is no longer concerned with questioning if such publication will, can, or
should exist, nor does it today look to the future for such publication to
arrive; rather, debate now concerns itself with issues that take for granted
both the existence and the potentially positive role of electronic publications
in the scholarly community. That said, discussion and debate rarely includes a
treatment of the pragmatic necessities involved in establishing and maintaining
those electronic publications.
My intention in this paper is, thus, not to map out the history of thoughts and
ideas surrounding electronic publication, nor to provide a statement of its
relevance. Rather, my paper focuses on something that is less often addressed:
the more basic, but absolutely essential, activities necessary for one to
publish electronically.
Drawing on my experience as founder (1994) and editor of the electronic journal
Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS), my talk will
outline a number of pragmatic concerns and some specific difficulties inherent
in the production of a scholarly electronic journal. Topics to be covered in my
paper include the establishment of the journal; the editorial efforts involved;
distribution of work, and working with a widely-dispersed editorial group;
submissions, peer-review, and publication preparations; the evolution of our
publication and data-management techniques over a 5 year period; markup; how
EMLS monitors readership; how we respond to
readership patterns and reader feedback on the site; the ability to sustain such
an electronic journal, long-term; some impediments to electronic publication, at
the local level and beyond; economic and funding considerations; issues of
indexing and copyright; and others. More generally, I will also address several
concerns that become apparent when one explicitly considers the pragmatic needs
of the scholarly community that such publication seeks, ideally, to serve.
The journal, EMLS, has as its focus the literature in
English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Entering its fifth year of
publication in 1999, it has served well in excess of half a million 'documents'
-- papers, reviews, notes, announcements, and so forth -- to a group consisting
of some 3,500 regular readers and ten times that number in occasional browsers;
readers access the journal via the internet, at , as well as its mirror site at
Oxford U and its archive at the National Library of Canada. EMLS is indexed by the MLA International
Bibliography, the Modern Humanities Research Association's Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature,
and a number of other services and databases.

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