The Credibility of Electronic Publishing

 

An Executive Summary, Submitted to the HSSFC

Note: This section is not to be included in the public dissemination of this report.

Summary

In this document, the HSSFC-appointed research team has provided a critical assessment of the North American and European literature surrounding the notion of credibility in electronic scholarly publication and has made recommendations that take into account both that literature and factors unique to our national context. Assessment and recommendations have been made in distinct, though interrelated identified earlier by the HSSFC, areas of Peer Review and Imprint, Copyright, and Archiving and Text Fluidity / Version Control.

This report focuses attention upon a number important areas and tasks directly related to the pragmatic acceptance of electronic publishing's credibility in Canada (as elsewhere) at the moment.  Areas in which the HSSFC necessarily has an important stake for the community it represents are as follows:

  1. Working with the larger academic community, to emphasize that electronic publishing needs to receive proper and due consideration as a valuable professional activity;
  2. Working with those who are responsible for the review, publication and preservation of academic materials in electronic form, to ensure that the best qualitative standards, reliable dissemination and ongoing availability and archiving are wholly integrated into their publication and preservation processes;
  3. Ensuring that all involved groups work together toward what is, indeed, the common end of the advancement of knowledge;
  4. And, as an essential component of all the above, taking on the duty of raising awareness not only of accepted resources that are available to facilitate scholarly interaction, but also acknowledging professionally-approved venues for such interaction and making available clear criteria for assessing such venues.

Recommendations that are more specific to each section of the report are presented, in brief, below.

Recommendations of Individual Sections

Peer Review and Imprint

Identified as the most important factor to assuage the reluctance of scholars to publish electronically, peer review is a process that has become a cornerstone of academic publication; correspondingly, it is something that is highly valued in all scholarly activities (among them, the pragmatics of academic review processes on which promotion and tenure are based).  Like peer review, a publisher's imprimatur, or imprint, is seen to be a very important indicator of qualitative assurance in academic culture.

Our findings suggest that where similar qualitative guarantees exist -- guarantees of peer review, publisher imprimatur, and beyond -- electronic academic publication must given the same value as print publication; indeed, it is the mechanism that makes the claim of qualitative assurance, and not the medium.  

The HSSFC should, immediately, formulate policies that support this assertion.

Academic administrators must also recognise this, and academic authors concerned about the evaluation of their own electronic publications should bear this in mind when they select publication venues appropriate to their work and its audience.

Copyright

Suggestions for the HSSFC, drawn explicitly from our survey of copyright issues, include the following:

  1. Use all available academic and political channels to encourage new approaches to scholarly communication, based on non-profit, electronic publication and distribution models.
  2. Establish a task force to develop a cooperative model for the electronic publishing of Canadian journals, and a series of "best practices" in electronic publishing.
  3. Take steps to inform the academic community of the existence of existing guidelines concerning intellectual property and the acceptability of electronic publishing.
  4. Develop a guide to "best practices" when it comes to the many questions relating to copyright in the delivery of online courses.
  5. Encourage a practice whereby authors publishing in Canadian journals retain copyright to their work, immediately or after a set period, so that they will be able to co-publish on open academic Internet sites.

Archiving and Text Fluidity / Version Control

Issues surrounding text fluidity and the archiving and preserving of electronic scholarly objects are important and complex.  There are several broad recommendations that we can make based on our research to-date:

  1. To ensure that we have a stake in an emerging National Policy on preservation, the HSSFC should ensure that it is involved in this ongoing consultation and also work with the National Library and the National Archives who are developing their own programs.
  2. Designing methodologies to deal with text fluidity and the preservation of scholarly digital objects must be carried out at the international level, and work in which Canada, and the HSSFC, must be involved.
  3. Essential standards for metadata need to be designed by the international community for the purposes of managing, tracking, and presenting version control data. This is crucial if there is to be any confidence in electronic publications as a scholarly vehicle. There should also be metadata designed for the purposes of managing the peer review of electronic scholarly publications and sites. HSSFC could take a lead in this if sufficient resources were made available.

Conclusions and Recommendations Drawn Specifically from the Questionnaire

The following are some tentative conclusions that we can draw from the responses to our questionnaire.

  1. Most respondents have experience using electronic resources and making scholarship available electronically, though only 16% had published in peer reviewed electronic venues.
  2. A significant number of respondents feel that there is a difference in quality between electronic and traditional publications and most feel that non-electronic outlets are more credible.
  3. Institutions should develop policies regarding the evaluation and copyright of electronic publications if they wish to encourage such publication. Where institutions have such policies, they need to better educate people about these policies.
  4. The existence of suitable peer reviewed or reputable outlets for electronic publications needs to be better advertised in the scholarly community. Many academics either do not feel there are suitable venues or they are not aware of the ones that are there.
  5. Despite concerns about quality and credibility, most reviewers are likely to judge an electronic publication on its own merits especially if it is in a peer reviewed electronic publication or from a reputable publisher.
  6. Peer review and the reputation of the publisher are important to the credibility of electronic publications. In particular, peer review processes that are the equivalent to those followed for print publications, while taking into account the electronic medium, can guarantee an equivalent level of quality for electronic publications.
  7. Authors are more likely to submit documents to electronic publications if they are peer reviewed and/or published by a reputable organization.
  8. Given concerns about the long-term accessibility of electronic publications it is important that standards and archiving services be developed to reassure authors that their publications will continue to be available over the long term. It is possible that well advertised and well understood standards for archiving would alleviate concerns about the credibility of electronic publishing which might then lead to such publications being taken seriously for tenure and promotion.

Specific Suggestions to Academic Administrators and Authors

Our findings suggest that, where similar qualitative guarantees exist (peer review, publisher imprimatur, and so on), there is no reason for electronic publication to be given anything other than the same consideration as is accorded print publication.

Academic administrators should recognise this, and should encourage their own institutions, and their colleagues at all Canadian academic institutions, to develop formal guidelines for the evaluation of electronic publishing in cases of tenure, promotion, and salary, and to make the existence of these guidelines known to the academic community.

Further, academic authors concerned about the evaluation of their own electronic publications should consider taking the following steps:

02/22/2001