Worldwide, completely free, and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journal literature is a social and academic good. It is important for the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and as such to the academic guild and to society in general. It is important for individual researchers, students, libraries, and the general educated public.
The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (JHS) is one of the academic, blind peer-reviewed, open access journals that provide such access electronically and whose contents are freely and permanently available to all. The number of articles and reviews it publishes yearly has grown steadily since 1996 — the year in which it is established — and so has its readership....
[T]he journal has become well-established....[T]he time has arrived to think about future developments in electronic open-access scholarly publication....
Worldwide, free, and unrestricted distribution of peer-reviewed articles and reviews using Internet technology was "revolutionary" a decade ago — and perhaps still is in many ways. However, the actual format in which the material was disseminated was, and still is, not "revolutionary" at all. We, as almost anyone else in the field of open-access journals, publish articles and reviews as PDF and HTML files....Our presentation of textual information follows the Gutenbergian model of a printed page, which in fact goes back for millennia to early writings....
The first challenge today for e-publication in our field is not to create new formats for the sake of "newness," but to think of textual presentations, or systems of textual presentations, that are more reader-friendly for the purposes, and within the mode, in which we read. In other words, we must think about how we read scholarly texts. We do read texts in linear ways, and therefore any new presentation should keep the text at least as friendly as it is now for that type of reading. But we also read texts in non-linear ways. When we read an article, we often stop to check a verse and then continue our reading; we then stop to read a footnote and at times go and grab another article or monograph to see what X or Z said about the issue....
[At JHS we decided to] keep the usual pdf format as the main way of publishing articles, but on the other we should develop and provide in our site marked xml files of the same texts.
The purpose of these xml files is to allow readers to create their own hypertexts, if they so wish, within the limitations of open access databases....[O]ur xml files should allow easy inclusion of future resources.
What kind of hypertexts do we imagine our readers would like, beyond the system of footnotes? We thought of the co-texts that people tend to have around their desks. For instance, we imagined that readers would like to be able, if they wish, to click on a reference to a verse (or verses) and view it in its original language, or gather relevant discursive, syntactical, or morphological information, or view several ancient and a variety of contemporary translations, or bibliographical databases mentioning works that deal with this verse....
We also thought that improving search capabilities would make documents more helpful....
[T]o implement all of these while keeping the journal open access, which is a non-negotiable issue for us, is a tough act. It involves technical, financial, and general resources challenges....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/05/2007 10:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
