At 11:18 AM 9/12/97 +0100, Chris Rusbridge wrote:
>I have had a look at two of the papers from the conference mentioned in
>the announcement below, and they look very interesting, if not entirely
>good news.

Chris doesn't elaborate on the bad news, but it might be those papers that
point out the low subscriber take-up of electronic-only journals and the
amazingly high publisher cost overheads. Isn't this, though, a classic case
of the medium is the message?

The above examples point at commercial publishers - the paper by Janet
Fisher of MIT Press is especially candid. Putting aside any pre-conceived
ideas that knowing this raises, the important point is that what these
papers are about is the medium of paper, despite any appearance to the
contrary. 

To consider the electronic medium let's take the example of this very
Proceedings. I have seen two notices for it this week, the comment in the
second from Chris R prompting me to have a look. I am today nowhere near my
university library, yet within minutes of receiving the notice I had the
essential information from those papers that interest me. Now the audience
for papers on electronic publishing may not be large, but larger than the
current subscriber base of the journals referred to in the conference
papers, and I suspect that within a short time the majority of this
audience will haveheard about and looked at these Proceedings. That is the
message, and in this case especially it is more powerful than the content,
because this is not about the relative merits of free against for-pay
information but about what works in the new medium.

So I would endorse Chris' recommendation to read this material because the
content is thought-provoking and because ultimately you will no doubt learn
more about the medium and the message by the process of reading it than
from the content itself.


>----- Forwarded message from Louise Fisch -----
>
>Dear cni-announce subscribers:
>
>The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in collaboration with the
>Association of Research Libraries, recently announced the availability
>of selected papers from the conference, Scholarly Communication and
>Technology.  The two-day conference, organized by The Andrew W. Mellon
>Foundation and held at Emory University in April 1997, brought together
>technologists, publishers, librarians, and scholars to discuss the
>changing nature of scholarly communication in the electronic environment. 
>The papers can be accessed via the ARL web site at: 
><http://arl.cni.org/scomm/scat/index.html>.  


Steve Hitchcock                                                          
Open Journal Project
Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science  
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK                     
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (01)703 594479          Fax: +44 (01)703 592865
*****************************************************
Open Journal Project Web page http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ 
"Bringing journals alive on the World Wide Web"
*****************************************************




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%