Selling disserations:

Enhanced Writing Functionality

and Scholarly Journals on the Web

The escalating cost of academic serials (Cummings, et al, 1992; Sosteric, 1996; Wyly, 1998; Yoon, 1998) and the opportunities of the World Wide Web are breaking down the traditional relationships between scholarly writing and publishing. Publishers are responding by offering digital versions of their paper journals, but scholars are already experimenting with new forms of communication such as web repositories of "e-prints" (Hafner, 1998), or seeking alternatives to traditional publishing venues (i.e., International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication (http://www.icaap.org). Scholars are also enhancing the functionality of their writing by producing web documents. For example, the American Historical Association is offering a scholarship to support adverturous historians: "We will help the author figure out how to add links and illustrations and create any multimedia additions" (Young, 1999). The digitization of scholarly writing gives scholars powerful new tools to express themselves, reach students and analyze data.

The successful web-based scholarly journal of the 21^st century must combine scholarly cultural needs, such as peer review, with enhanced writing functionality. The intended research will investigate how enhanced writing functionalities are shaping the emergence of new web scholarly journals.

The Enhanced Functionality of Web Writing

The scholarly journal arose in the age of print. Typically, a scholar used a typewriter to create the scholarly article, a printer used moveable type to print it, a publisher used the postal system to distribute it, and a librarian used library buildings to store it. The Internet and the World Wide Web have transformed scholarly writing, publishing, dissemination and storage. Suddenly scholars can publish directly to the Web. Suddenly text is enhanced with media and active content. Suddenly students can interact with course material on their teacher’s web site. The following sketch demonstrates how a scholar can utilize the enhanced functionality of web writing:

I sit at my office computer, an NT Server. I write a file in MS Word and save it as HTML. I place the file under the wwwroot subdirectory. I elaborate the text to include active content such as Java Applets and JavaScript. A student points his web browser at the file, reads it, and engages the active content. My JavaScript script places a cookie on the client machine so that on subsequent viewing of the document, the contents are changed appropriately for that student. The text the student views is a virtual product of numerous files and scripts, as well as a contingency of his previous engagement with the text.

The powerful functionality that I can employ in constructing my course materials or writing a web textbook is generally not available to me when I write for publication in scholarly journals. For example, when I write for JASIS – Journal of the American Society for Information Science, my text is transformed into a PDF file and uploaded to the Wiley InterScience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/) web site. [At this time the functionality of hypertext, image and media files, http links, scripting and so on are not supported.]

This irony—that the premier information science journal is still essentially a paper artifact—prompted the forecast (Brooks, 1998b), on the occasion of JASIS’s fiftieth publishing anniversary that it is unlikely to enjoy another fifty years without radical transformation. Brooks argued that the only appropriate information "journal" of the 21^st century would be a web site.

The disparity between the individual scholar’s enhanced writing functionality for the web and the limited writing functionality supported by web scholarly journals is the primary research motive for this application. This research will (1) Survey the writing functionality supported by scholarly journals on the web, (2) Determine what type of web "journal" design that supports the greatest writing functionality, and (3) Survey the satisfaction of a random sample of web authors.

The findings of this research will speak to the future of academic journals. To find that academic journals can support, or are preparing to support enhanced functionality suggests their ultimate survivability. To find that academic journals are not supporting enhanced functionality suggests their ultimate demise in favor of a web form that is in more accord with new scholarly writing functionality.

Different Kinds of Web Journals

While the functional basis of the paper scholarly journal is well known, the functional basis of the web scholarly journal is not. Web journals can be created along a spectrum of functional capability:

At one extreme, a web journal is composed of articles converted into HTML or PDF and uploaded to the web (An example would be JASIS at the Wiley Interscience site).

At the other extreme, a web journal becomes a portal or web site (Examples that illustrate this approach to varying degrees: Cogprints, e-math, political methodology, Econwpa, lanl e-print archive,and social science research network)

The "journal as web site" design is one of the most functionally complex methods of creating a scholarly journal. An "article" may be a virtual product of multiple files residing in the same subdirectory. The advantages of this functional design include: (1) Text can be enhanced with media files, scripting and Java applets, (2) Versioning is supported (i.e., the familiar idea of a "final" version cedes to continuously updated versions), and (3) Associated texts such as criticisms and justifications can be included. Lost are familiar journal characteristics such as authoritative versions and periodical publishing.

As a candidate for the editorship of JASIS, I wrote a vision statement, JASIS at 2010 (Brooks, 1998a) speculating on the functional form for a web version of JASIS. As a member of the editorial board of JASIS I have witnessed the enormous angst provoke by the potential lost of familiar signposts such as definitive versions and numbered issues. I have witnessed the reluctance to accept the dynamic new functionality of writing employed by scholars. My personal experience suggests that much of the anxiety of transferring a scholarly journal to the web arises from the ignorance of (1) What are the various possible strategies for creating a web journal? (2) What are the functional implications of each strategy? One of the socially useful products of this research would be to provide groups such as the editorial board of JASIS information about possible web design alternatives.

A Survey of Functional Complexity of Web Writing

The intended survey would investigate three areas: (1) What functionality is supported? (2) How is currency maintained? and (3) How is functional obsolescence avoided?

(1) What Functionality is Supported?

For purposes of the intended survey, the functional complexity of web writing is composed of the following elements (in rough order of increasing complexity). This list is intended as suggestive, not exhaustive; web journals may support functionalities not listed here. The proposed survey would determine which of these elements are supported by various web journal strategies.

Transforming text into PDF or HTML
Supplementing a text file with image or media files.
Using style sheets or XML
Using dynamic hypertext supported by only certain kinds of Internet browsers
Scripting with JScript, JavaScript or VBScript
Java applets with possible Remote Method Invocations
Dynamic database results produced by ASP scripts and MS Access
Client-side ActiveX controls requiring validation or certificates

(2) How is Currency Maintained?

Currency of context is one aspect of web writing that requires periodic maintenance. The research project would survey the support for the following authorial demands (in no particular order). Again, this list is intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive.

Desire to update URLs
Desire to replace/upgrade image files, media files
Desire to replace/upgrade scripts with new functionality or with compatibility with new scripting standards
Desire to replace/upgrade Applets with new functionality or with compatibility with new Applet methods

(3) How is Functional Obsolescence Avoided?

Web journals that host functionally complex documents must have policies to handle the following technical obsolescence problems:

Scripting incompatibilities among JavaScript, VBScript and Jscript
Versioning incompatibilities within any scripting system
Versioning incompatibilities within the rapidly developing Java language

The Research Questions

This research aims to investigate the writing functionality supported by web scholarly journals, limitations on web writing functionality of each design, and any existing policies for currency maintenance and technical update. Comparisons of web writing functionality will be made to web textbooks and scholarly web sites.

Research Question: Are there identifiable patterns among web scholarly journals in provision of web writing functionality? Are the more functionality sophisticated documents to be found at the journals organized as web sites?

Research Question: What policies exist for maintenance and update of functionally sophisticated documents?

Research Question: Would web writing tools directly under the control of scholars themselves, such as textbooks and web sites show comparatively more enhanced functionality of writing?

Research Method

A random sample of scholarly journals will be drawn from lists such as Scholarly Journals Distributed via the World Wide Web (University of Houston), and Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Other web venues for scholarly writing will also be surveyed. The Encyclopaedia Diplomica and Oxford Academic, for example, publish scholarly papers on the web and pay authors royalties in return.

The electronic submission guidelines will be analyzed for support of writing functionality.

A questionnaire detailing the functional complexity and maintenance/update issues listed above will be submitted to the editors of the web scholarly journals.

Selected interviews will be done with web journal editors by telephone.

A random sample of web textbooks will be drawn from sites such as Medical Textbooks Online, Statistics Textbooks Online and ConnecText Catalog: A Web Textbook Registry

Comparisons of writing functionalities will be tabulated.

A random sample of authors of articles in web scholarly journals will investigate their satisfaction with

writing for a web journal.

Budget

Activity	Estimated Cost
Graduate Student ($15/hr for 10 hr/week for 30 weeks)	$ 4500
Graduate Student Benefits @ 10%	$ 450
Office sundries (Including telephone calls)	$ 200
Total Direct Costs	$ 5150
Facilities and Administrative Costs (52%)	$ 2678
Total Costs	$ 7828

References

Arenson, K. W. (Monday, November 2, 1998). "More Colleges Plunging into Uncharted Waters of On-Line Courses." New York Times, p. A14.

Brooks, Terrence A. (1998a). JASIS 2010 – A Vision Statement for JASIS, Journal of the American Society for Information Science.(http://weber.u.washington.edu/~tabrooks/Documents/vision2.htm)

Brooks, Terrence A. (1998b). Post-Modern Information Science and its "Journal". (http://weber.u.washington.edu/~tabrooks/Documents/postmodern.html)

Cogprints (http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ )

ConnecText Catalog: A Web Textbook Registry (http://www.connectext.com/indlef3.htm )

Cummings, A. M., Witte, M. L., Bowen, W. G., Lazarus, L. O., and Ekman, R. H. (1992). University Libraries and Scholarly Communication. Association of Research Libraries.

Econwpa (http://wuecon.wustl.edu/)

Electronic Journals - References and Links (http://www.people.virginia.edu/~pm9k/libsci/ejref.html)

e-math (http://www.ams.org/preprints/)

Encyclopaedia Diplomica (http://www.diplomica.com/ )

Hafner, K. (Tuesday, April 21, 1998). "Physics on the Web is Putting Science Journals on the Line." The New York Times, p. B11.

lanl e-print archive (http://xxx.lanl.govl/)

Medical Textbooks Online (http://www.drsref.com.au/books.html )

Oxford Academic (http://www.ool.co.uk/oxac/ )

political methodology (http://polmeth.calpoly.edu/)

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html )

Scholarly Journals Distributed via the World Wide Web (http://info.lib.uh.edu/wj/webjour.html )

social science research network (http://www.ssrn.com/)

Sosteric, Mike (1996). "Electronic Journals: The Grand Information Future?" The Electronic Journal of Sociology 2. http://www.sociology.org/vol002.002/Sosteric.article.1996.html

Statistics Textbooks Online (http://math.uc.edu/~brycw/classes/147/blue/tools.htm )

Wyly, B. J. (1998). Competition in Scholarly Publishing? What Publisher Profits Reveal. (http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/osc.html)

Yoon, C. K. (Tuesday, December 8, 1998). "Soaring Prices Spur a Revolt in Scientific Publishing" The New York Times, p. D2..

Young, J. R. (January 22, 1999) "Award Will Put Winning Monographs on the Web" Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A20.

Brief Vita of Terrence A. Brooks (http://weber.u.washington.edu/~tabrooks/vita.html)

Education

Ph.D. Library Science, 1981
Dissertation: "An Analysis of Library-Output Statistics"
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Employment

Associate Professor, October 1991-
Assistant Professor, 1986-1991
Graduate School of Library and Information Science,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Journal Articles

"Post-modern Information Science and its 'Journal'" Article in preparation.

"JASIS 2010" - A vision statement for JASIS - Journal of the American Society for Information Science. An invited vision statement requested by John Wiley, the publisher of JASIS.
"The Semantic Distance Model of Relevance Assessment." Proceedings of the 61^st Annual Meeting of ASIS, Pittsburgh, PA, October 25-28, 1998: Information Access in the Global Information Economy, Vol. 35 (pp. 33 - 44)
"The Effect of Textual Aesthetics on Information Retrieval" in R.D. Hersch, et al. (Eds.), Electronic Publishing, Artistic Imaging, and Digital Typography: 7^th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, EP '98, St. Malo, France, March 30-April 3, 1998 (pp. 454 - 463). Berlin: Springer-Verlay, 1998.
"Orthography as a Fundamental Impediment to Online Information Retrieval" Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.49(8), 1998, 731-741.
"The Relevance Aura of Bibliographic Records." Information Processing and Management, v.33(1), 1997, 69-80.
"Topical Subject Expertise and the Semantic Distance Model of Relevance Assessment." Journal of Documentation, v.51(4), December 1995, 370-387.

Professional Activities

Chairman, Best Information Science Book Award, ASIS 1998.
Book Review Editor, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1995 -