David Beattie, director of operations for the SchoolNet system funded by Industry Canada, addressed delegates about the challenges facing electronic publishing in Canada. He spoke from the perspective of a government department which is encouraging learned journals to acquire an on-line presence.
There are a number of scholarly electronic communication and publishing initiatives supported by Industry Canada, and in particular by its Virtual Products division. Much of this work takes place in the context of SchoolNet. SchoolNet is a cooperative federal/ provincial/territorial network of educational sites and services, with a major, but not sole, focus on primary and secondary schools. The network supports almost 10,000 of the targeted 16,500 schools to be connected via the Internet by the end of 1998.
SchoolNet serves the post-secondary community through the National Graduate Register, which allows potentials employees to post their skills and employers to post their needs. The Register currently contains 45,000 student resumés, and up to 400 resumés are requested by employers daily. SchoolNet and AUCC have joined forces to create searchable on-line university calendars. An on-line database of graduate awards is under development. The network has also supported the creation of an inventory of distance education courses.
The Industry Canada approach to on-line scholarly publishing involves a number of key elements. The first element is support of public education, without any profit-generating goals. For scholarly journals, this principle would translate into the publication of university research on a non commercial basis. The second element "supports publishing enterprises owned by the creators of the research or their university communities." This model is less expensive to access, and serves as a community-developed alternative to private and proprietary publishing services.
In Beatties' view, "electronic publishing, specifically on-line publishing, provides the scholarly community the opportunity to take back the ownership of its own research, while maintaining or increasing quality, to escape the spiralling cost treadmill the commercial academic publishers have" imposed. If the scholarly community does not take up this opportunity, commercial publishers will add on-line publishing to its repertoire at current or spiralling costs. This will not ease the pressure on university libraries nor on research budgets.
The first challenge, therefore, is for the academic community to decide who should own the on-line publishing enterprise.
Researchers have expressed concern that work published electronically will not be granted the same credibility as work published traditionally, on paper. This will affect promotion and tenure review and influence granting council decisions. A number of bodies, however, including CAUT, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the granting councils, and the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation, have already accepted the idea that "on-line publishing is the equal of on-paper publishing, given equivalent standards of peer review and archiving."
New on-line journals will not initially have the same prestige as established journals with well-respected editorial boards, and this is a problem that would have to be addressed.
Other challenges impeding establishment of electronic journals relate to maintaining subscription revenue, preserving copyright, and ensuring digital integrity. SchoolNet has supported a number of projects illustrating these concerns, and reports are available on the SchoolNet web site (http://www. schoolnet.ca). One successful example is the six-year-old ejournal called Surfaces, jointly managed by Les presses de l'Université de Montréal.
The Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science is published in both print and digital format. Although subscriptions for the print version actually increased, two independent production streams meant higher overall publishing costs. A possible solution might be the use of software such as a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), recognizable by both printers and world wide web facilities.
After a number of unfortunate trials, SchoolNet has helped to organize a collaboration among publishers of scholarly journals. The member publishers intend to develop a series of tools and services needed to engage in electronic publishing. To date, the membership list includes the Canadian Mathematical Society, University of Calgary Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, University of Toronto Press, the Canadian Association of Learned Journals, the Journal of Conservation Ecology, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of the National Research Council, Les presses de l'Université de Montréal, the Electronic Text Centre of the University of New Brunswick, as well as SchoolNet itself.
Although this collaboration has not yet engaged in on-line publishing, individual partners have taken the electronic plunge. The group has embarked on a number of projects including: long-term maintenance of scholarly information; consistent, searchable document descriptions; document tracking during peer-review; manuscript preparation guidelines; Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for transferring paper-based document to electronic format; and subscription services.
SchoolNet helps to find funding for these collaborative projects. David Beattie expects that once projects are underway the collaborators could solicit financial assistance from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Ken Field focussed on the financial crisis facing scholarly publishing. He supported the idea of providing a scaled service for on-line publishers so that both small and large publishers can benefit. This will at least keep alive the dissemination of scholarly research in Canada. However, the universities grant little in the way of support for their own publishing houses. Given the crisis in post-secondary funding, it may not be surprising that the university press is suffering. Ken Field wonders what will happen once the federal government ends the financing for SchoolNet in 1998. He suspects that the behemoth publishers will continue to monopolize the field and drive costs upwards.
Jennifer Bankier commented on the issue of ownership and copyright. She encouraged at least some nonprofit academic journals to adapt their publication procedures and copyright regimes to a more flexible and accessible electronic environment. She noted that "academic culture is a gift culture where the goal is sharing of the fruits of scholarship through publication and teaching, not the sale of information for financial reward." Academics should also have the right to permit free use of their works if they so choose. A model for achieving this end would entail setting up permission clauses and lists associated with, for example, academic-controlled electronic journals such as those produced by the various learned societies.
For further details on the ownership and copyright proposal mentioned in Jennifer Bankier's comments above see professor Bankier's paper available through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site: ftp://ftp.cc.umanitoba.ca/e-journal/ICREJ03/Bankier.wp5