Not all of us have Apple Macs

Notes: If you’re thinking of adding a comment to this, please read I’m going to a conference and you’re ALL invited first. There’s no 9am post for June 6th because I’d like this to stay at the top of the page till 15:00.

‘Not all of us have Apple Macs: Inter-operability and web publishing for journals’

This is a paper about the challenges and opportunities that the use of the internet creates in academia. It’s a bit of a departure for me. It’s the first time in a long while I’ve actually written the paper before delivering it. I’m not sure if it will take some of the fun out of it, because usually I’m interested to discover what I’m going to say about something and this time the mystery is gone. The reason I don’t write papers out in full is that I find the idea of calling speaking in front of an audience a ‘paper’ a bit silly. A paper is a written text which you can flip back a few sentences if you don’t quite get something or skip over the dull bits. A talk is rigid in structure. It has a beginning middle and end and they happen when I say so. Because the media are different the language and presentation style should be different in my opinion. Even though I’m going to try and keep to the text in this case, differences will occur because usually when we speak we extemporise anyway. Actors don’t but I’m not a trained actor.

The reason I have a written text is that this is a simultaneous presentation. As I give this talk today at the AHRC conference in De Montfort University, it will also be available over the web. So long as we have internet access in the hall you can put forward ideas and comments to be discussed in the hall around 14:30 and the delegates in turn can add their own thoughts. Hopefully this will be after the conference because I’m a slow typist. I’ll be honest I’m not expecting much interactivity, because I think people have better things to do, but it’s an option. The reason I’m doing it is that I’d like to give some people a taste of what we can do with electronic media. Incidentally this paper may also re-surface in a conference volume so comments on this entry will be considered fair game for re-publication. You have been warned or, if you prefer, invited. Some discussion would certainly be welcomed because I want to keep this short and get people in the hall talking about what they want to do with publishing.

The reason for doing this is that I was involved in the Undoctored Past, the postgraduate journal for Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History. We’d been kicking round the idea of having a postgraduate journal for a few years before I got on the project, but no-one had actually done anything about it. Which should have been a clue as to the biggest problem would be. I’d come in from web design so I had ideas about what I wanted to see from a journal. I wanted it to be printed. I did not want a web journal because I prefer books.

Let’s be clear about the value of printed text. Access is instant. The download wait is not existent, it’s as if the text is already there. A journal doesn’t crash unless you throw it really hard. You can leave it on a shelf in the library and when you come back to it it’s unchanged. It’s not been deleted, re-designed or replaced with satellite decoder site. You can flip through them quickly, there’s no scrolling and they don’t strain your eyes with their glare.

Books work. So how did we end up with a web based journal?

Printed text is slow. The post-grads come in broadly two types at Leicester. They’re all interested in getting publications out to improve job prospects. Additionally, some students are interested in feedback on their ideas, so they can be improved. I had a paper I wanted to get out quickly in Spring 2003. I was quoted Christmas 2005 or 2006 by one journal. Web publication should be faster.

The reason I’m so wary of web-based journals is that when you make things electronic things go wrong. The title of this paper comes from the fact that I suspect Gavin Cole, organiser of this conference, has an Apple Mac. On my computer some of the programme is unreadable and the font used is Apple Chancery. In designing the Undoctored Past we set out three levels of accessibility we wanted to achieve.

1. Accessibility for the individual reader

2. Accessibility for other web sites

3. Accessibility for the public as a whole

Accessibility for the Individual Reader

I think going through the mechanics of creating an accessible website would be tedious and irrelevant to most people. I’d rather talk about the process of reading. Reading papers on the internet is a very bad idea, unless you actively seek out migraines. A slightly more spurious argument against internet publishing is that you cannot read electronic papers in the bath. This is both wrong (if you own a PDA) and irrelevant. The cost of printed journals are astronomical. No-one in their right mind would read a journal in the bath anyway. You might read an offprint though, so the solution is not to provide a waterproof internet journal, but a method for reliably producing offprints for those who want them. This is achieved by selecting the option ‘File’ and then ‘Print’ on your web browser. If you haven’t tried this I suggest you do so now.

The cynic will point out that any web page can be printed. The best argument for not doing so from the browser is that it often looks awful. This is why Digressus, a post-graduate Classics journal, is clever as they provide their files in PDF format which is suitable for printing. It is not the only option. It is perfect possible to provide printable pages with no extra work using Cascading Style Sheets. This is demonstrated on the Undoctored Past and my personal site.

It works because the browser has access to two style sheets. The first is for the screen. It applies the colour to the page. The second sheet is specified for the use of the printer. The content remains the same, only the style changes. The menu to the right disappears because in the printed version the links back to the homepage are of absolutely no use. Internet Archaeology may argue for the existence for papers solely as electronic entities, to the extent of rendering papers needlessly awkward to print (see http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue1/gillings/part12c.html#xtocid12426 for one such pointless page), but experience shows that even their papers are printed by the user. If an internet journal is going to be a desirable read then it must compromise to work with the reader. This does not mean producing a special print file of each article and storing it on the web, merely assisting where possible the printing of material for the use of the reader. Dividing the content of the paper from the styling should make sites accessible to a variety of readers and will assist when inevitable obsolescence sets in.

A web-based journal can also make use of enhanced search facilities. If you’re looking for a paper on Stonehenge on both the Undoctored Past and my personal site you can type ‘Stonehenge’ into the search box and work out very quickly if you’re wasting your time. Being able to render an entire journal irrelevant to someone’s research in a matter of seconds might sound like a drawback to a journal editor, but for researchers it’s potentially a huge time-saving feature. In the longer-term I would be more likely to return to use journals that I know I can search efficiently.

Accessibility for other web sites

Another argument for the power of the internet is the use of hypermedia. With a click on a link like this one, you can reach beyond the current text and see the original cited text. Academics who find the typewriter dangerously modern are already familiar with the notion, though they call it ‘citation’. The hyperlink may seem novel to people who don’t cite earlier works, however hyperlinking is nothing more than citation. In fact it is probably worse. A good citation in a book will enable you to find the original source eventually. Hyperlinks differ. If the page you link to disappears then you may never find the original text or worse still you may find unexpected text. The website http://www.stonehengemasterplan.org has thankfully disappeared. It used to carry information about the plans for the development of Stonehenge. The current site http://thestonehengeproject.org still refers to it occasionally. I say stonehengemasterplan used have the information to as someone didn’t renew the registration. The name was taken by a company which chose to show other information which it claimed ‘left nothing to the imagination’, though I’ll leave it to yours.

However the impermanence of webpages can be a benefit. A much touted advantage is ‘interactivity’. I struggle to recall any interactive print journals, though there are many interactive weblogs. The move from static pages gives us the possibility to debate over the web. The anthropology journal iNtergraph was built around this premise and the power is easy to demonstrate. Below is a comment form. If you think this is tosh and that no-one would want to comment on a paper then fill it out and tell me. If you know of a webpage that proves that dynamic pages cannot function in the academic environment then you can even reference it by including the link simply by including the address of the page in the comment. I would argue that in this the creation of links can lead to a deeper reading for the text. Yes, it is still citation but the collaborative accumulation of references and comments by multiple authors on the master copy of a paper is something of a different scale to what can be seen in print. The annotations found in books within the university library rarely travel, no matter how insightful. Where web-based journals have the potential to radically alter research is through the use of trackbacks.

Unless you regularly browse weblogs the trackback concept will have passed you by. Trackback is an effect which can happen when weblogs start interacting with each other. For instance Michael Shanks may feel that some of my comments are wrong. He could write his own article on the flow of information across journals and link back to this page. This is simple citation. However, because Michael Shanks also uses weblog software he can place a trackback. This would add a note to the bottom of this page linking to and highlighting his comments. This gives a longevity to texts. Should I write on academia and the web again in ten years time, I can trackback to this article to show how my thoughts have changed. Someone researching in fifteen years time could still read this paper and find the added trackback to more recent papers. Consider this applied to the conventional print media. If an old paper in a journal could be constantly updated to show who referenced it then links to corrected data could ensure that old papers could still be read and receive the credit they deserve. Trackbacks could also create ‘node’ papers which would make some papers comprehensive bibliographies of the subjects they discuss. This assumes the connecting websites share a commitment to Open Access which brings the final level of accessibility.

Accessibility for the public

You’d think that Open Access would be a foregone conclusion for a postgraduate journal for the reasons I gave earlier but you’d be wrong. I’ve been informed quietly that at least one publisher is trying to woo postgraduates into having their journals published professionally over the internet. If they succeed and subscription barriers go up then technologies like trackback will fail. However I would say with sites like Blogsome and Blogger being available for free, and postgraduate sites likely to be low-traffic sites I can see no justification for postgraduate journals to go to a subscription model, other than to make publishers money.

You could argue there’s a moral problem in people paying taxes and then an extra subscription to see AHRC funded work. Instead I’ll appeal to your self-interest. As I mentioned at the start, this paper is live on the web. Judging by previous comments on publication it’s going to be picked up be people around the world. I’ve had comments on Open Access mentioned by Open Access News, which came as a shock because I didn’t realise anyone was reading my site. This paper will get a wider readership than any other paper given today if you don’t publish via Open Access, regardless of quality. The evidence has been recorded in studies by Harnad and Brody and Antelman. That should bother you. The Stoa Consortium based in Kentucky picked up another throwaway comment I made which sums up the challenge.

[T]echnophobia is an endearing character quirk in the Arts rather than a sign of academic incompetence. I don’t think it’s a long term problem. Researchers who are more interested in spreading their ideas than supporting established structures will have greater influence on successive generations and there will be a move to open access publishing, because researchers who ignore it will be ignored.

I don’t know the exact details of what is planned for the conference proceedings. I can tell you that as an AHRC funded project it should be eligible for free archiving in the Arts and Humanities Database Service. Once placed there your work will be available for anyone with a web connection to read. That gives you method, motive and opportunity. Is that enough to secure a conviction that online open-access publishing is the way to go?

Conclusion?

So after hectoring you all I’ll finish with a confession. I said talks have a beginning, middle and end. This talk potentially has no end. I have nightmares about attending conferences where that happens, so I’ll explain what I mean. I’ve invited comments on this paper on the web. The plan is that if the conference proceedings are published the commentators will become co-authors of a paper on 21st century publishing. I’ve tried to finish early because I want to open up discussion in the audience about what we want from academic publishing. I’ll also try connecting to the web now and see if any readers also have thoughts on how we need to adapt publishing to current academic circumstances. I’m hoping for insightful comments on aspects I’ve missed in which case I’m about to look a little silly. Another possibility is that there’ll be no comments, in which case I’m about to look a little silly. But despite that somewhat pessimistic statement, I’m optimistic about the future. The spread of literacy helped scholarship. With the use of web publishing in the 21st century there’ll be more literature accessible for people to read.

Over to you. —–