DigitalKoans

In 1989, the Internet was much more fragmented than it is today, and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and Usenet newsgroups. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," which tried to persuade CERN officials to support a global hypertext system (it was not called the World Wide Web until October 1990, when he coded the first server and browser). 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.

In June 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review: a journal that, if it has been published today, would be called an "open access journal," since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Nineteen years later, I've published a variety of other freely available digital works, including DigitalKoans, 72 versions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.

"A Look Back at Nineteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher" provides a chronology of the highlights of my digital publishing efforts, updated use statistics for them, and a brief bibliography of articles about them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Digital Scholarship Publications, Open Access, 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.