Perspectives in Electronic Publishing: Experiments with a New Electronic

University of Southampton Research Repository ePrints Soton Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk Hitchcock, Perspectives in Electronic Publishing Prologue What time is it Eccles? Scene Two plain clothes detectives surround the Crun omnibus factory, secreted in the ground floor attic of a nearby clock repairers. Various timepieces ticking, chiming and cuckooing. A chicken clucking. Finally a hooter. Bluebottle (aka Peter Sellers): What time is it Eccles? Eccles (aka Spike Milligan): Err, just a minute. I've got it written down on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning. Bluebottle: Ooooh, then why do you carry it around with you Eccles? Eccles: Well, um, if anybody asks me the time, I can show it to dem. Bluebottle: Wait a minute Eccles, my good man. Eccles: What is it fellow? Bluebottle: It's writted on this bit of paper, what is eight o'clock, is writted. Eccles: I know that my good fellow. That's right, um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o'clock. Bluebottle: Well then. Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn't eight o'clock? Eccles: Well den, I don't show it to 'em. … Bluebottle: Well how do you know when it's eight o'clock? Eccles: I've got it written down on a piece of paper. Bluebottle: Ohh, I wish I could afford a piece of paper with the time written on. Eccles: Oohhhh. Bluebottle: 'Ere Eccles? Eccles: Yah. Bluebottle: Let me hold that piece of paper to my ear would you? 'Ere. This piece of paper ain't goin' Eccles: What? I've been sold a forgery. Bluebottle: No wonder it stopped at eight o'clock. Transcript from The Goons, The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conker, first broadcast 7th February 1957 1 Hitchcock, Perspectives in Electronic Publishing There is a sense in which scholarly researchers, librarians and archivists are effectively emulating Eccles by seeking to migrate and maintain the record of research on the Web while, for a variety of reasons, clinging to its print characteristics. Take, for example, reactions to JSTOR, the service that digitises copies of old print journals: “It seems there's not much bad you can say about an organization whose mission is to "preserve and maintain journal literature, and to make that material more accessible.” (Phillips 2001) Yet when we try to add dynamic, time-varying features to the scholarly literature, as the electronic information environment compels us to do, reactions become more polarised, as this thesis and the model of the title that it uses to explore these issues, shows. Academic research preserves the results of its endeavours in the form of an authorised record, historically in printed journals and other publications. In this system information is fixed in time. Thus readers can, with a greater or lesser ease determined by cost or location, access the individual published records and view them as a true record of the author’s intent. The benefit of preservation is that a reader today looking at a printed issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, from 1934, say (the earliest year currently available in the JSTOR archive), will see exactly the same articles as his or her predecessors. But the reader’s context, his or her view of the world or line of enquiry, will be entirely different. It is possible to enhance the purpose of preservation in a digital environment by enabling the user to select time-varying services that can be superimposed without detracting from the original document. Take a familiar example – in scholarly papers connections with earlier works are established by authored references. Garfield (1955) showed that analysis of these references across a broad section of the literature can reveal influences on later works, e.g. what cites this paper? While references are a standard feature of scientific papers, citation analysis requires additional services. ISI, the information company set up to exploit Garfield’s method, and other recent projects show that electronically it is possible to make citation data accessible either within, or closely linked with, an original paper, although it is clearly not an authored part of the paper. Yet in the scholarly information chain we remain constrained by the continuing emphasis on writing, content and preservation, to the exclusion of other data services. The problem with digital preservation is not the technology but deciding exactly what to preserve and in what form to preserve it. There are no cost-free options. At one level all that needs to be preserved are an author's original 2 Hitchcock, Perspectives in Electronic Publishing words and illustrations, simply the digital bits (Negroponte 1995). For the archival journal literature, digital preservation concentrates on saving page images, naturally, since that is the only available version of the data. But then the emphasis switches subtly to page fidelity. For Web-originated materials, preservation may be concerned with saving the presentation, that is, reproducing the user's experience. Add the attention given to technology migration and emulation as a means to preserve both digitised and digital experiences, and barriers begin to be erected – cost, technological and cultural barriers – to other uses of these digital resources. Alternatively, content can be separated from presentation, in practice as well as principle, recognising that beyond the original authored content it is not necessary to preserve everything from a given presentation in time. Otherwise it will never be acceptable to add new data to presentations. Clearly, it is facile to write down the time. Listeners may laugh at Eccles and Bluebottle who are revealed, by nuances of language and expression, to be more dim-witted than they. Stripped of its audible expression, the dialogue may be more likely to provoke incredulity. The simplicity of the example may be disarming, but both reactions mask a sense of unease, that we have a very simplistic notion of time and its effects. New media, especially networked, computer-based information services, are beginning to expose that unease. 3 Hitchcock, Perspectives in Electronic Publishing 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivations Scientists and researchers, Nobel Laureates among them, have produced the clearest declaration of their requirement for access to published research papers – a comprehensive collection that can be efficiently indexed, searched, and linked: 'a dynamic digital archive' (Roberts et al. 2001). This thesis is not about the form of the archive. It is about the 'dynamic', the innovations and services that might begin to emerge if the content of the archive, or collective archives, becomes freely, or openly, accessible. “Unimpeded access to these archives and open distribution of their contents”, Roberts et al. continue, “will enable researchers to take on the challenge of integrating and interconnecting the fantastically rich, but extremely fragmented and chaotic, scientific literature.” That declaration encapsulates what this thesis, and the model it promotes, contend are the vital features of any system of electronic scholarly communication, which must be: • Integrated and interconnected, making something accessible from something else • Dynamic, computationally adding time-critical data services Allied to the idea that electronic access to scholarly papers might be open to all regardless of location, background or privilege, these characteristics point to the main inspirations for the work described in this thesis. In an integrated information environment we can expect to reproduce Bush’s (1945) ‘intricate web of trails’ in a way that more closely matches the speed and spontaneity of enquiry, especially in scholarly research. We may at last be able to approach this vision with today’s powerful computer networks. It is not simply the computing power of a network that matters but how it connects people. Publishing, like a network, connects people. Nelson saw interconnected information, or hypertext as he called it, as a means to create a world publishing system, but his approach was superseded by the leaner, simpler, less imposing model of Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, which attracted the interest of publishers of smaller, more traditional units of publication. On the Web the core skill of non- fiction publishing, creating 'information interfaces', can be applied more powerfully: “In the old model, the information product is a container. In the new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other centers it.” (O'Reilly 1996) 4 Hitchcock, Perspectives in Electronic Publishing Despite calling for a dramatically different information environment, the scientists’ statement implicitly supports the continuing role of journals as validators and filters of the scholarly literature that they expect to form the core content of the archive. Fulfilling this expectation will profoundly change journals, for which the scientists are the principal contributors and users. In particular, two issues endemic to the established scholarly journal publishing system will have to be tackled: • Decoupling content from publishing process and function • Reversing the fragmentation of the scientific literature This thesis presents a new model electronic ‘journal’ that, conceived and developed before this debate, can claim to contribute to the scientists' objective of a dynamic, integrated and interconnected literature.

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