DigitalKoans

Version 71 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,250 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview."

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

Scholarly bibliographies are not destined for the bestseller list. This is especially true of bibliographies that deal with fairly specialized topics vs. those that deal with topics of more general interest. Selling more than a few hundred copies of a specialized bibliography is a major achievement.

Does open access to digital bibliographies change the picture? Two digital books, one of which is also in print form, illustrate the potential of this new publishing strategy.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been freely available since 1996. What has use been like? Below is a table that shows file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content; page requests are a subset of file requests).

From 2006 onward there is only partial use data, since all or part of the University of Houston Libraries' use data for this period is unavailable to me. (DLIST and E-LIS use is not included for any year.)

In my experience, Web log statistics provide a general indicator of the magnitude of use, but not an absolutely precise one. There are also hermetic disputes about whether spider activity should be included, as it is above.

There are four things to note about SEPB: (1) it was born digital and has live links; (2) in July 2004, it was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that permits any kind of noncommercial use or reuse; (3) it has been updated 70 times, and these updates have been advertised; and (4) it includes a Weblog and a resource directory. It also has a prehistory: the freely available article that it was based on had 26 versions, so one could argue that the bibliography has 96 versions.

These characteristics make SEPB represent an extension and evolution of the traditional bibliography model, but not a perfect example of it.

For more information on the evolution of SEPB, see the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

The second bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, is closer to the traditional model because it has not been updated and it is based on a printed book. There are two digital versions: a PDF file and a XHTML site, neither of which has live links. All print and digital versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. The OAB was advertised on the Internet and elsewhere.

Below is a table that shows OAB file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand. It does not include any use of the digital book at the publisher's Website (Association of Research Libraries) nor at DLIST and E-LIS.

Does open access make a difference? The history of these two open access digital books suggests that it can significantly increase use. As the potentials of digital publication are more fully exploited (e.g., linking and updating), use may be driven even higher. However, these examples tell us nothing about the commercial potential of open access books, since my data are for "no-profit" use only and do not include ARL sales data for the print book (I do not receive royalties and do not have access to this data).

In 2007, there were over 849,000 hits (a "hit" is any Web file retrieved) and 779,000 page views (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content) for the Digital Scholarship Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive (use statistics for the 1996-2006 University of Houston Libraries SEPB archive are unknown). WebLog Expert was used for this analysis; the below rankings are by number of visitors.

There were over 195,000 visitors from 154 countries. The top 20 countries were: United States, Sweden, Canada, United Kingdom, France, China, Germany, India, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Korea, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, and Romania.

The top ten academic institutions were: University of Illinois; Texas A&M University; Stanford University; Seton Hall University; Norwegian University of Science and Technology; University of British Columbia; University of California, Office of the President; Cornell University; Tohoku University; and University of Washington.

In 2007, there were over 78,000 hits and 72,000 page views for the Digital Scholarship Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals archive (use statistics for the ARL OAB archive are unknown).

There were over 39,000 visitors from 155 countries. The top 20 countries were: United States, China, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Bulgaria, France, Spain, Sweden, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Korea, Poland, Turkey, and Romania.

The top ten academic institutions were: Universitaet Hamburg; Loughborough University; University of Illinois; Universitat Pompeu Fabr; Stanford University; Leeds University; Michigan State University; Texas A&M University; University at Albany, State University of New York; and University of Portsmouth.

Version 70 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,195 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see "Summary of Bailey’s Digital Publications Changes."

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 69. The ZIP archive file is about 40 MB in size.

Last July, I reported on use of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, which is both a printed book and a freely available e-book. Both versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 License. You can get a detailed history at the prior posting; the major changes since then have been the conversion of the HTML version to XHTML and the addition of a Google Custom Search Engine.

So, what does cumulative use of the e-book OAB version look like slightly over one year down the road from the last posting? Here's a summary:

• UH PDF: 29,255 (March through May 2005)
• All Web files on both Digital Scholarship hosts: 192,849 (33,814 uses of the PDF file; June 2005 through July 2007)
• dLIST PDF: 655 (March 2005 to present)
• E-LIS PDF: 556 (November 2005 to present)
• ARL PDF: Not Available

Combined, OAB Web files have been accessed 223,315 times since March 2005.

When I began my digital publishing efforts 18 years ago, the global network environment was much more fragmented than it is today (for details, see The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide), and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and USENET newsgroups. Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can get a good sense of the context of my digital publishing efforts by consulting the Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2 and the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 to June 2007.

• 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 scholarly 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, then Wei Wu maintained it as a searchable Web site until 2006.
• 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). See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• December 17, 1996. Published 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.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans provides commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• September 29, 2005. Made a SEPB archive Zip file available that contains all versions of the bibliography. This file is updated with each new SEPB version.
• January 8, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• February 21, 2006. With Version 61 of SEPB, ceased publishing the Acrobat version.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• October 25, 2006: Created a Google Custom Search Engine for the OAB.
• October 28, 2006. Created a Google Custom Search Engines for SEPB and SEPW.
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries’ servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 4.2 million successful Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files since January 1994; LISTSERV use was unknown (see the PACS Review use statistics and the 2006 update). There were over 6.6 million successful Web file requests for SEPB since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics).
• January 8, 2007. Replaced the mirror Blogger SEPW Weblog with a new one on the digital-scholarship.org domain using WordPress and FeedBurner.
• February 11-12, 2007. Recoded the Digital Scholarship Web sites to give them a common look and feel. Published an HTML version of the "Open Access Webligraphy."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• May 31, 2007. There were over 3.9 million Web file requests for the escholarlypub.com, digital-scholarship.com, and digital-scholarship.org domains since April 2005 (see the .com and .org use by countries reports).
• June 19, 2007. Published version 68 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).

Jacsó, Péter. "Peter’s Picks & Pans." Review of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76.

Jensen, Ann. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005).

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.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 68. The ZIP archive file is about 38 MB in size.