Introduction
Publishing is both a model and a method, an art and
a craft, for making an information asset publicly or generally known,
of declaring or reporting openly, to place before or offer to the
public [1].
It is generally understood that the complex process
of publishing a scholarly work involves a suite of interdependent
activities:
-
Acquisition: the identification
and evaluation of intellectually and financially viable properties,
the peer reviewing of these projects, the negotiation of rights
with property owners, and the cultivation and management of relationships
with authors, editors, and stakeholders.
-
Development: editorial intervention
to add structural and grammatical value to a work.
-
Design: the transformation of
text and graphical material into aesthetically satisfy works on
paper and on-line through an understanding of the principles of
visual communications (typography and graphic architecture).
-
Production: the manufacturing
of a work on paper, or on line.
-
Marketing and Distribution: the
research, development and execution of cost-effective campaigns
and strategies to achieve maximum exposure, and sales, of the
finished work.
Publishing
at Cornell University
Technical innovations and economic pressures still cast a long
shadow over the scholarly publishing community. Readers’ and users’ appetites
have become more sophisticated while the cost structures for
managing and delivering book and especially journal content electronically
have become far more complex.
Project Euclid
Five years ago, the Cornell University Library submitted a proposal
to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the design and
deployment of a mechanism and environment for the on-line distribution
of serial literature in mathematics and statistics. That initiative —
Project Euclid — was
funded in 2000 and launched as a multi-model publishing service
in early 2003. Today Euclid, the flagship product of the Library’s
Electronic Publishing Program, delivers nearly 40 journals to libraries
and individuals via subscription or open access.
Project Euclid is a novel and influential contribution
to the debate about the future of scholarly communications. The
Euclid model offers a remedial and sustainable prototype for how
serial literature for academic communities of common practice can
be enriched and delivered cost-effectively.
"SPARC has had the opportunity to work closely
with Cornell’s Project Euclid team since the earliest stages.
I know first-hand of their commitment to serving the needs of
libraries and scholars. I am confident that Project Euclid will
reflect the best practices and policies of SPARC and its publishing
partners, with our shared mission of 'Returning Scholarship to
Scholars.'"
— Rick Johnson, Enterprise Director, Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
DPubS
Building on the success of Project Euclid, the Library is undertaking
an equally ambitious project to enhance and extend the software
system originally developed to deliver journal content from the
Project Euclid publishers. Digital Publishing Systems and Services
(DPubS) will provide authors, editors, and publishers with a more
cost-effective way to capture, transform, distribute, and archive
digital scholarly research.
The enhancement of the DPubS platform, which supports
Project Euclid, will include the following developments:
-
Create a general purpose publishing system
-
Provide on-line editorial management services
to support peer review activities
-
Upgrade the administrative functionality and
interface, and
-
Provide interoperability with institutional repository
systems
The new version of DPubS will be developed by the
Library in partnership with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries
and the University Press and will be made available to research
institutions, university presses, and scholarly societies worldwide
as a scalable, modular open source system in 2006.
To learn more about the DPubS development agenda,
please visit http://dpubs.org
Publishing Services
The Library will also offer suite of publishing service for authors
and editors seeking economies of scale within the hospitable environment
of a leading academic institution. We are contributing our extensive
expertise in the management of digital files to ensure that best
practices in digital preservation are applied to online scholarly
content.
The mission of the Electronic Publishing Program is
to develop and deploy cost-effective publishing products, and to
catalyze and educate the local community of editors and authors.
Our goal is to foster the practice of affordable scholarly communications
through innovation. Our staff of seasoned publishers and skilled
programmers and project managers bring perspective to the technically
complex and dynamically social craft of making scholarly research
public.
Alternative Publishing Options
and Experiments
arXiv: A very active archive for
pre-prints, mainly in physics, mathematics and computer science
maintained by the Cornell University Library. This is probably the
single most successful effort to date to create a new method of
exchanging high quality scholarly information.
Cornell
Technical Reports Repository: A repository for use by Cornell
scholars maintained by the Cornell University Library.
The Scholarly Publishing and
Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): An increasingly successful
effort to create journals that will compete with specific, highly
priced journals.
Digital Library of the Commons
(Indiana Univ.)
E-Scholarship
(Univ. of California): A kind of launch pad for scholarly electronic
information.
BioMed Central: A very
innovative commercial service that makes refereed journals freely
accessible to the world.
Budapest Open Access
Initiative: A new program that calls for self-archiving by scholars
and the creation of new, open-access journals.
Public Library
of Science: An agreement by scholars not to publish in journals
that do not make their articles freely accessible within six months
of publication.
Footnote
1. OED Online, 2/e (1989)
