E-Publishing in Academia: Opportunities and Challenges for Library Professionals

 Mohamed Musthafa. K

& 

Dr. Naushad Ali. PM

Abstract

Electronic publishing is an opportunity for the libraries to undertake the responsibility of publishing the intellectual output of any academic institution. Library and information centers as the central point of intellectual activities in the academic environment and the librarians have experience of working with people from different subject areas in order to support their activities and to deliver services to them, and they also have professional skills associated with the management and dissemination of information, they are the most suitable professionals to play the role of publisher in the academic environment. This paper discusses the possibilities and opportunities of electronic publishing in this regard. At the same time there are challenges like publishing skills, technology skills, experience, copyright and preservation issues in electronic publishing.  This paper discusses some of the important issues which should be addressed when the librarians start to play the role of e-publisher.   A list of popular open sources e-publishing models which are downloadable at free of cost has also been given.

Keywords: e-Publishing, Libraries, Academia, e-Publishing models

MedKnow publications

A number of journals from India are published by the learned societies or their editors without the involvement of commercial publishers. MedKnow publications is a for-profit open access journal publisher providing services to more than 35 journals. Sahoo (2006) provide the features of MedKnow publications which maintains an independent website for each of its journals which provide full text of articles without any access restriction. The full text is available in HTML and PDF. The web site use open URL standard, making linking easier and Dublin Core Metadata. Websites provide interactive features such as ability to add comments on published articles, usage statistics and translation into eight foreign languages. Links are given to Pubmed and databases such as DSMZ and Species 2000. MedKnow has put in place an online manuscript submission and peer review system through which over 10,000 manuscripts have been processed by 2006. After becoming online the visibility and reach of the journals has increased greatly. The projected impact factor of JPGM has increased from 0.25 in the year 2000 to 0.99 in 2005 and a continuous growth has been seen in manuscript submission an article download also.   

Sahu, DK (2006). Journal publishing in the developing world: MedKnow publications as a model. INASP Newsletter, Spring, pp 7-8.

Open access to scientific publications

Bjork (2004) share the experience of last ten years in open access scholarly communication. Despite widespread agreement among academies that OA would be the optimal distribution mode for publicly financed research results; such channels still constitute only a marginal phenomenon in global scholarly communication system. There are many barriers which hindering a rapid proliferation of open access. The discussion is structured according to the main OA channels; peer reviewed journals for primary publishing, subject-specific and institutional repositories for secondary parallel publishing. It also discusses the types of barriers, which can be classified as consisting of the legal framework, the information technology infrastructure, business models, indexing services and standards, the academic reward system, marketing and critical mass.

Bjork, BC (2004). Open access to scientific publications- an analysis of the barriers to change?. Information Research, 9 (2). Retrieved on April 4, 2010 from http://inforamationr.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html.

Interactive open access publishing

Poschl (2010) argued that the advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the benefits and viability of this approach are clearly demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and a growing number of sister journals launched by the publisher Copernicus and the European Geosciences Union. These journals are practicing a two-stage process of publication and peer review combined with interactive public discussion, which effectively resolves the dilemma between rapid scientific exchange and through quality assurance. The same or similar concepts have recently also been adopted in other disciplines, including the life sciences and economics. The principles, key aspects and achievements of interactive open access publishing (top quality and impact, efficient self-regulation and low rejection rates, little waste and low cost) are outlined and discussed.

Poschl, U (2010). Interactive open access publishing and public peer review: The effectiveness of transparency and self-regulation in scientific quality assurance. INternation federation of Library Associations and Institutions 36 (1) pp 40-46. Retrieved on November 29, 2010 from http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/publications/ ifla-journals/fila-journals-36-1_2010.PDF. DOI: 10.1177/0340035209359573.

An often-cited reason authors make their articles openly accessible is to maximize the impact of their research. OA article is more likely to be used and cited than one published commercially. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact (citation impact). In May 2005, 16 major Dutch universities cooperatively launched DAREnet, the digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available online. By the 2009, the repository holds in excess of 69,000 articles. In April 2006 European Commission recommended that research funding agencies should establish a European policy mandating published article arising from EC funded research to be available after a given time period in OA archives. Libraries and librarians are also among the most vocal and active OA advocates. Many library associations have either signed major OA declarations or created their own (Irivwieri, 2009).

Irivwieri, JW (2009). Research into open access science publishing. Library Hi-Tech News 3 (4), pp 16-18.

ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin.

In Germany, university libraries have the duty to collect the dissertations from their own students and the German National Library is obliged by law to collect all paper based German dissertations. In addition to this there was a project entitled ‘Dissertation Online’ which finished in 2001 and attempted to make available the dissertations online. By 2003, there were 10,173 electronic dissertations in Germany. A student in Germany can publish in most universities electronically. In average, 16% of the students publish electronically and in some particular universities it is upto 25%. Electronic publishing gives a chance of higher quality and quantity of retrieval. One of the biggest problems of electronic publishing is long term archiving of documents. Other problems faced by Humboldt University were i) storage media: there were no experience about the long term, and what is the right media, tape or CD-ROM or any other? ii) the file format: the recommended format were XML or SGML but there were not enough tools to convert to XML from other formats like MS-Word, Word Perfect, LateX or StarOffice. 

Schirmbacher, P (2003). Electronic theses and dissertations and the necessity of a new culture of electronic publishing: ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin. Retrieved July 21, 2010 from http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/conferences/etd2003/schirmbacher-peter/PDF/index.pdf.

open access journal initiatives in India

Sawant’s study in 2009 revealed that there were 178 open access journals available online in India. Almost 50 percent of the online journals from India are open access. Out of 178 journals there were 17 social science and 161 science and technology journals. Most of the journals were published or funded by government agencies such as ICAR, ICMR, academies such as IASc, INSA, learned societies, associations, commercial publishers and even editors. About 64 percent journals are published or hosted by MedKnow and Medlars Centre. All journals are peer reviewed, indexed and abstracted in premier indexing and abstracting services such as Index Medicus, Chemical Abstract Service, SCIRUS, SCOPUS, EMBASE etc. Most of them are also linked from DOAJ, PubMed and OJ Gate. Online full text availability of the journals varies and their archives were mostly available from 1998 onwards. All the journals are available online and 163 journals published as hybrid journals. There were only three journals which ask authors to pay for publishing.

Sawant, S (2009). The current scenario of open access journal initiatives in India. Collection Building, 28 (4), pp 159-163. DOI: 10.1108/01604950910999819.