DigitalKoans

A Look Back at Sixteen Years as an Internet Electronic Publisher

Update: See "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher" for current information.

It was sixteen years ago today that I became an Internet electronic publisher. Little did I know what would result from the apparently simple act of starting an early mailing list called PACS-L. Below is an abbreviated chronology of my electronic publishing efforts so far. They would not have been possible without the support of Robin N. Downes, the former Director of the University of Houston Libraries, and the efforts of volunteers from the UH Libraries and elsewhere. Thanks to all of them.

June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers.
August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), a free e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement).
January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers. Authors retained the copyright to their articles. Liberal copying was permitted for noncommercial purposes.
March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad’s "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the UH Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document; Wei Wu maintains it currently.
January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions.
September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996. (See the PACS Review Wikipedia article for more details about it.)
October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement).
December 17, 1996. Created the first Acrobat version of SEPB.
September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
March 2001. Started contributing reviews to Current Cites (reviews).
June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
December 31, 2004. There were over 2,602,000 successful Gopher or Web requests for PACS Review files since January 1994; LISTSERV use was unknown (see the PACS Review use statistics). There were over 4.2 million successful Web requests for SEPB files since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics).
March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals. The book was made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats (the PDF version was freely available).
March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW.
April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans (RSS feed), a Weblog that provided commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
June, 10 2005. Published version 58 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.

Articles about These Electronic Publications

: Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.
: ———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).
: ———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).
: ———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.
: Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L’s First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.
: DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.
: Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).
: Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.
: Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.