Chris Rusbridge wrote
>Anyone planning
>to make changes to the content of ejournal papers must surely have a very
>strong policy on how this is to be done, perhaps parallel to the concept of
>new editions of monographs. One of the virtues of publishing should
>surely be some sort of "fixing" of the version, compared to the private
>copies on personal web sites which may have been updated significantly.
This seems to be missing the point of the Internet: it isn't there to
'parallel' print models, it is quite distinct. The idea of 'fixing' things
on the Internet is alien to this new form. This is the source of the
problem, I agree.
Last night I watched the BBC Omnibus programme on Spike Milligan in which
they played an excerpt from the Goon Show where Spike's Eccles character has
the time 'writted' down for him: 'How do you know when it's eight o'clock?'.
'It's written down on this piece of paper' he says. We laugh, but I wonder
if there will come a time when the concept of 'copying' the Internet will
seem as bizarre as writing down the time.
I know that for scholarly works this goes against the grain, but speed is
one of the new dynamics of the Internet, and it would be surprising if it
didn't have an effect. Take one example. If it is important for authors to
publish quickly, presumably they will develop ways of writing more quickly.
One way to do this: use the hypertext link. We are bound eventually to begin
writing in new ways. What is being archived then?
Fytton Rowland wrote about CD-ROM archiving
>Admittedly this does not preserve the WWW hypertext
>links, but it does preserve the *new* knowledge content of the journal in
>its full multimedia form (which print cannot).
Ah, but what if the 'new' information is contained within the links? It's
not a very good archiving system that can't preserve the complete
information. The new buzz seems to be 'hybrids' (CD/Web), which gives you
the links back, but then you are on the ever-changing Internet again.
My guess is that if an off-Internet archiving system evolves, its
relationship to the Internet will be like that between the Los Alamos
archive and most physics journals: both forms have a purpose, but for
readers one is live and one is dead.
>> Our experience with publishing project papers on the Web is that we have
>> declined requests to mirror these papers simply because we intend to make
>> periodic updates and we didn't want to propagate obsolete versions.
>
>So how do _you_ indicate the different versions, and do you keep the
>original available for reference?
To be frank, we have modified (and re-dated) papers without changing them
sufficiently to be considered new editions, in our view, but that time may
come. These papers are entirely conventional, and in this respect are not
examples of the model I have outlined above; and yes, because of this, we
probably need a policy as Chris suggests, but this is now, and I am looking
ahead somewhat. Ironically, we have agreed to one of these papers, our
journals survey, being published on paper in a forthcoming directory, so
maybe we still have the best of both worlds, but I wouldn't bet on it lasting.
Steve Hitchcock, Open Journal Project,
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
Southampton University, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1703 594479 Fax: +44 (0)1703 592865
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk
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