Introduction

In June 1989, I launched PACS-L, a LISTSERV mailing list. PACS-L was one of the first library-oriented mailing lists, and, at the time, it was unusual in that it had a broad subject focus (public-access computer systems in libraries, such as online catalogs) rather than a narrow focus on a specific library automation system. Although PACS-L's greatest contribution may have been in raising librarians' awareness of the importance and potential of the then fledgling Internet, it was also the platform on which my initial scholarly digital publishing efforts were based.

In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.¹ This journal, if it was published today, would be called a "libre" open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Aside from Public-Access Computer Systems News (also "libre" open access), my subsequent digital publications, such as the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, were "gratis" open access until 2004, when all new versions of existing publications and new publications became "libre" open access under various versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.²

For current information about my publication activities, see "Brief Resume of Charles W. Bailey, Jr." and "Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr."

Chronology

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 through June 2009. See "A Look Back at Twenty Years as an Internet Open Access Publisher" for a more detailed chronology, articles about these digital publications, and research studies that included the PACS Review.

• 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. The establishment of PACS-L facilitated the development of my scholarly digital publications.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review, also known as PACS-R), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement). (See the list of PACS Review editorial staff.)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 University of Houston Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement).
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• 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, with the last version being published on October 25, 1996. Starting with version 23 (June 25, 1996), the bibliography was searchable.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996.
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. The bibliography is searchable. See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• November 15, 1996. Published the first Word version of SEPB in version 2.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB in version 3.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• April 19, 2002. With Version 42 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Word version.
• 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 included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.³
• 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 is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repositories, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• July 8, 2005. Published the first version of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• August 10, 2005. Made a preprint of the "Open Access Webliography" available (coauthored with Adrian K. Ho).
• October 25, 2005. Published the first version of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• December 31, 2005. There were over 352,000 escholarlypub.com Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2005 by over 146,00 visitors from 163 countries.
• 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.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• April 28, 2006. With Version 62 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Acrobat version.
• November 1, 2006. Resigned my position as Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, where I had worked since November 1987 (previously as either Assistant Dean for Systems or Assistant Director for Systems).
• 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 2.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2006 by over 663,000 visitors from 195 countries.
• December 31, 2006.There were over 4.2 million Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files from January 1994 through December 2006 (use data after December 2006 is not available).
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2007 by over 1.8 million visitors from 206 countries.
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 21, 2008. Became a member of the Open Access Directory Editorial Board. Helped build the initial Wiki, and continue to add content to it.
• April 29, 2008. Published the second annual PDF version of SEPB. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• May 12, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• June 14, 2008. Authorized using the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals as the basis for a new wiki bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access.
• December 9, 2008. Published version 3 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• December 31, 2008. Published the third annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 15.9 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2008 by over 3.4 million visitors from 214 countries.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 8.6 million Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web file requests from October 30, 1996 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 313,000 Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals Web file requests from March 3, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 71,000 "Open Access Webliography" Web file requests from August 10, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• January 20, 2009. Published version 3 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 5, 2009. Published Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition as a print-on-demand paperback book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (Equivalent PDF version was freely available.)
• May 12, 2009. Published version 75 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• June 5, 2009. There were over 20 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though June 5, 2009 by over 4 million visitors from 221 countries.
• June 29, 2009. Published version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• June 29, 2009. There were over 2,100 DigitalKoans posts in over 90 categories.

Notes

1. 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. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline and Internet History. Thanks to Robin N. Downes, then Director of the University of Houston Libraries, for his strong support for my digital publishing efforts from 1989-1996.

2. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

3. Thanks to Peter Suber for his assistance with the Open Access Bibliography and his encouragement during its writing.

As of today, the DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository contains over 31,000 documents, has had 2,132,581 full-text downloads to date, and 1,307,822 downloads in the past year (see the bottom of the repository's home page). It is also used to publish RURALS: Review of Undergraduate Research in Agricultural and Life Sciences, a gratis open access journal. It uses the Digital Commons software from the Berkeley Electronic Press.

The University of Arizona Libraries and UA Regents' Professor Richard Wilkinson have collaborated to publish a new quarterly e-journal, the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, or the JAEI, was created by Wilkinson, a UA classics and Near Eastern studies professor, and will be hosted on the UA Libraries' institutional repository site, also known as UAiR.

The digitially-based, peer-reviewed journal explores the relationship between ancient Egypt and its surrounding regions and helps develop an important new trend in Egyptological scholarship by taking an interdisciplinary approach.

The journal publishes full-length articles, which have been subjected to the same peer-reviewed, blind screening process used by traditional scholarly print journals. The JAEI will also include short research notes, reviews of published works, announcements and reports of relevant conferences and symposia.

The journal also examines the relationship between ancient Egypt and its neighbors through different lenses, ranging from history to technology to art and religion. . . .

The journal counts Oxford and Harvard universities among its initial subscribers and subscriptions have already been received from a number of countries. Interest has also been high among scholars wanting to contribute to the journal.

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries and Kirtas Technologies will offer a new service that allows customers to request that public domain books in Penn's collection be digitized and printed on request.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Today, Kirtas announces a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to make over 200,000 titles available to the public in a unique way.

Using existing information drawn from Penn's catalog records, Kirtas is able to offer out-of-copyright books for sale through its own retail site, www.kirtasbooks.com. What makes this initiative unique is that the books can be offered for sale before they are ever digitized, so there is no up-front printing, production or storage cost.

"This partnership allows us to gauge reader interest in on-demand digitization and printing services," said Carton Rogers, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. "That frees us from difficult selection decisions and lets the digital collection grow in response to user demand. The model is efficient and minimizes the risk as we develop new ways of addressing information needs."

Through www.kirtasbooks.com, customers will be able to search for a desired title, and when found, place a "digitize for me" request. The desired book will be pulled from Penn's shelves, digitized, processed by Kirtas for optimal reading and printing, and a newly-printed copy will be shipped to the initiator. Or, the customer can purchase access to an online-only version of the book. Once the book has been digitized, it is returned undamaged to the library shelf. . . .

Through this unique partnership with Kirtas, the Penn Libraries will also earn income on orders of its books. Distribution rights are non-exclusive so the books can be made available through the Penn Libraries, as well as other distribution channels at the library's request.

The Cornell University Library is increasing its print-on-demand books on Amazon.com to over 80,000 titles.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

By the end of 2009, tens of thousands of new books will be added to the approximately 6,000 items in Cornell’s collection already available on Amazon. All of the books are in the public domain in the United States, and many are currently out of print.

"Although demand for online access to digital books has been growing, books as artifacts continue to have a real value," said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "This initiative supports the reading and research patterns of users who prefer the affordances provided by physical books—they support deep reading, underlining and writing comments in the margins. The Web is great for easy access and browsing, but because digital content can sometimes be ephemeral, physical books continue to serve as valuable reference sources on your shelf."

Positive feedback from users helped contribute to the decision to expand the number of titles available. "The publication of this little book adds valuable primary source material for students of the War of 1812. Bravo to Cornell for making it available," one customer wrote. Another said, "Words cannot express how grateful I am that Cornell University saw fit to republish these two papers."

The books that will be added throughout 2009 were digitized with the support of Microsoft over the last two years. These new volumes represent a substantial part of the Library’s rare and unique offerings printed before 1923.

They will reflect Cornell’s subject strengths, including American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, human sexuality, labor relations, Native American materials, ornithology, veterinary medicine and women's studies. Collections already available for reprint from Amazon include New York state historical literature, core historical literature in agriculture, historical math monographs and materials related to home economics.

Cornell University Library has been a cutting-edge participant with print-on-demand services and mass digitization initiatives, partnering with multiple outlets to make its collections available to the public. The partnership with Amazon began in 2006, and the Library is currently engaged in a large-scale digitization initiative with Google that will create 500,000 digitized books over the next six years.

For a sample of the titles offered on Amazon, go to bookstore.library.cornell.edu, and check Amazon.com throughout the year to see new titles as they are added.

SPARC has published Campus-based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues.

Here's an excerpt from the report's Web page:

SPARC’s Campus-based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues addresses issues relevant to building sound and balanced partnerships, including:

• Establishing governance and administrative structures;
• Identifying funding models that accommodate the objectives of both libraries and presses;
• Defining a partnership’s objectives to align the missions of the library and the press;
• Determining what services to provide; and
• Demonstrating the value of the collaboration.

Also see SPARC's new Campus-based Publishing Resource Center.

With the addition of a backfile 1884 article, "Dermatitis Herpetiformis," in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, hit the five million article mark. Over two million of those articles are freely available.

Read more about it at "5 Million Articles Online at HighWire: The Evolution of an e-Publishing Platform."

EDUCAUSE has made available a podcast recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting: "Library Publishing Services: An Emerging Role for Research Libraries—An Interview with Karla Hahn." Hahn is the Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Association of Research Libraries.

The University of Michigan's digitalculturebooks, a joint imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, has published six open access books: The Best of Technology Writing 2008; This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age; Broadcasting, Voice, and Accountability: A Public Interest Approach to Policy Law, and Regulation; Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age; and Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China.

The books are also available for purchase in print form.

Catherine Mitchell, Acting Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, has been named as the permanent occupant of that post. In this capacity, Mitchell is responsible for the eScholarship Repository, eScholarship Editions, the Mark Twain Project Online, and other ventures.

In her statement about the appointment, Laine Farley, CDL Interim Executive Director, said:

Catherine has held the position on an interim basis since November 2007. During that time, she has led the group to develop a new services-oriented vision and to launch an ambitious redesign of the eScholarship interface. She was also the project manager for the Mark Twain project which successfully launched last November. Catherine’s dedication, deep understanding of scholarly communication, publishing issues, and professionalism are admired by all of us who work with her.