DigitalKoans

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

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Bibliographies, Creative Commons/Open Licenses, Digital Scholarship Publications, E-Books, E-Journals, History, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.