Tools for Academic Electronic Publishing

There are a number of new electronic publishing enterprises on University campuses and within University libraries that increasingly play a role in the contemporary publishing landscape. In particular, there are attempts underway to leverage established digital library infrastructure to support electronic publishing and to develop tools and methods for the electronic publication and distribution of scholarly content. These enterprises seek to support the traditional constructs of journal and monographic publication in an online environment, and to publish scholarly work expressly designed for electronic delivery.

For many of these initiatives, this is new territory, in terms of both mission and methods, and this a formative moment where there are many common problems and few common solutions. This meeting will take place under the aegis of the Digital Library Federation and be attended by a relatively small number of academic publishing practitioners that are developing electronic publishing efforts The meeting will serve primarily as a venue for sharing tools and technologies and for encouraging collaborative development. Although inevitably such a forum invites broad philosophical discussion of changes in the publishing world, the focus of the meeting will be on sharing approaches to supporting online publishing and on discovering opportunities for collaboration.

Amongst the topics for discussion will be the development of tools to support the submission and editorial process. Other problems to address include the possibility of mechanisms that allow at least limited output to print and mechanisms that support subscriptions, charging and access restrictions. On anther level, are issues of outreach to authors and editors and ways of providing them with meaningful training and tools to prepare their material for online publication. Finally, there are significant questions about content recruitment and sources: Should libraries be in the business of recruiting content at all? What rationale do libraries use for supporting publications at particular institutions? As academic institutions should we compete for content or collaborate on some logical division of disciplines or institutions? What fruitful and pragmatic intersections exist and can be developed between the work of University Presses and the work of University libraries in the digital arena?

This meeting will take place over a one and a half day period , blending presentation and discussion, and will consider the components of publishing and changes in those components in the electronic era. Time will also be reserved for demonstration of tools and products from the participants and for some explanation of the nature of the various publishing efforts. The meeting will conclude with some synthetic thinking led by DLF -- about ways in which these new publishing initiatives can work together on common problems. Throughout its focus will remain on tools, methods, and possibilities for collaboration, and the sessions will be structured to support this.

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