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.

The University of Tennessee Libraries' "Newfound Press Business Plan, 2008-2011" is available.

Here's an excerpt:

The University of Tennessee Libraries launched its digital imprint, Newfound Press (www.newfoundpress.utk.edu), in 2005 to develop a framework for making peer-reviewed scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Building on local digitization investments, Newfound Press has published two monographs, with two more in production and a third in the referee process. The Press currently hosts one born-digital journal and is considering a proposal for a second. To experiment with digital multimedia publication, the Press has compiled text, recordings, and ephemera from two scholarly conferences for public access. Through Newfound Press, the University of Tennessee demonstrates an open access publishing model that explores issues such as creating a process for peer review “on the fly,” exploring new channels for the discovery of research results, and establishing credibility as a viable scholarly publications venue.

The Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University has launched ETC-Press, which will publish books and other works under either the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivativeWorks-NonCommercial or the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Here's an excerpt from the About ETC Press page:

We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. We are an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com. ETC Press has an affiliation with the Institute for the Future of the Book, sharing in the exploration of the evolution of discourse. ETC Press also has an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to place ETC Press publications in the ACM Digital Library. . . .

We are looking to develop a range of texts and media that are innovative and insightful. We are interested in creating projects with Sophie, and we will accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.).

Peter Hirtle has posted a sharp critique of the National Archives' The Founders Online report on the LibraryLaw Blog that, among other points, questions whether the digitized works that result from the project will be free of copyright and access restrictions.

Here's an excerpt:

5. Perhaps the most problematic issues in the report surround its use of the term "open access." For some, open access means "digital, online, and free of charge." The report, while saying it wants to provide open access to the material, appears to recommend that all material be given to UVA's Rotunda system for delivery. Rotunda follows a subscription model—not open access—that is remarkably expensive considering that citizens have already paid for all of the editorial work on these volumes. How could this be open access? Apparently Rotunda might be willing to give up its subscription approach if a foundation were willing to pay for all of its costs. Unless such a commitment is in place, I find it disingenuous to describe a Rotunda delivery option as "open access." There is no discussion of other, free, delivery options, such as the willingness expressed by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress at the Senate Hearing to make all of the Founding Fathers papers accessible through LC (which already has a good site pointing to currently accessible papers).

6. Others argue that for true open access, information must be accessible outside of specific delivery systems (such as Rotunda) and made available in bulk. Open data and open interfaces allow for all sorts of interesting uses of material. For example, someone might want to mashup George Washington's papers to Google Maps in order to be able to easily visual geographically the spread of information. Others might want to mesh manuscript material with published secondary literature. Rather than anticipating the widespread dispersal and re-use of the Founding Fathers papers, however, and hence the need for harvestable data, open APIs, distributed access, etc., the report calls instead for "a single, unified, and sustainable Web site"—apparently the locked-down Rotunda system.

Introduction

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.

You can place my scholarly digital publishing efforts in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.2.

My scholarly digital publications have all been freely available, and you can place them in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

Chronology

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 to June 2008.

• 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.
• 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 University of Houston 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) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. 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 included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It 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 is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, DRM, net neutrality, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information 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 a corresponding 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 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."
• 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 Webliography."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• September 25-27, 2007. Redesigned the entire Digital Scholarship site. Converted Version 69 of SEPB to the new design, and recoded all other site documents in XHTML and CSS to comply with the new design.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.5 million Web file requests for SEPB since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics). There were close to 260,000 Web file requests for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals. 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).
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 6, 2008. Added a WordPress plug-in to create the DigitalKoans Category Index with Post Titles.
• 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 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography (version 1 was originally published as a DigitalKoans posting).
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography (version 1 was originally published as a DigitalKoans posting).
• May 31, 2008. There were over 10.8 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 2005 though May 2008 by over 2.5 million visitors from 212 countries.
• June 9, 2008. Published version 72 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. 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.
• 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 bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access, which will be written by OAD participants.
• June 28, 2008. There were over 1,100 DigitalKoans posts.

Articles about These Digital Publications

Altman, Ellen, and Allan Pratt. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 3, 1992, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (July 1994): 180-181.

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.

Cisler, Steve. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 71-72.

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).

Gillespie, Thom. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. The Library Quarterly 64 (January 1994): 100-102.

Henner, Terry. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 4, 1993, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. Research Strategies 13 (Summer 1995): 188-189.

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.

Piper, Alison I. Review of LIBRES: Library and Information Science Electronic Journal and Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS-R). Library and Information Science Research 20, no. 1 (1998): 108-110.

Staff. "The Imagineer—Charles W. Bailey." Library Journal, 15 March 2003.

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.

Further Information

Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

The Digital Library Federation has released presentations from its Spring Forum 2008.

Here's a selection of the presentations:

• Building a Large-Scale Preservation Repository Based on aDORe
• The Challenges of Applying Traditional Cataloging Standards to Non-Traditional, User-Created Descriptive Metadata in Digital Library Projects
• DLF Environmental Scan: Issues and Solutions for Archives in a Digital World
• DSpace Foundation: Charting a Course to Support the DSpace Community and Advance the DSpace Open Source Software Platform
• Introducing BibApp 1.0
• The NEW IUScholarWorks at Indiana University: Repositories, Journals, and Scholarly Publishing
• An OAI-ORE Aggregation for the National Virtual Observatory

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This paper was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the first step in a three-stage process aimed at gaining a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. It focuses on what we call 'online academic resources' (OARs), which are projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching. This includes scholarly journals and monographs as well as a vast array of new formats that are emerging to disseminate scholarship, such as preprint servers and wikis. It also includes digital collections of primary source materials, datasets, and audio-visual materials that universities, libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions are putting online.

This work is being done as part of the planning work for the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), so it emphasises the development and maintenance of digital content useful in the networked world. In this first stage, we have conducted an initial assessment of the relevant literature focused on not-for-profit sustainability, and have compared the processes pursued in the not-for-profit and education sectors with those pursued by commercial organisations, specifically in the newspaper industry. The primary goal of this initial report is to determine to what extent it would make sense to conduct a more in-depth study of the issues surrounding sustainability.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), will leave that post on June 30. Wittenberg says that she was told that Columbia University plans to shut down its electronic publishing operation.

Read more about it at "Is E-Publishing at Columbia U. on the Ropes?"