Corporation For National Research Initiatives Technical Issues in Electronic Publishing Corporation...

Corporation For NationalResearch Initiatives

Technical Issues

in

Electronic Publishing

Corporation for National Research Initiatives

William Y. Arms


Overview

• Examples of electronic publishing

• The installed technical base

• Technical initiatives

• Technical research topics

• From the soap box


Electronic Journals

Example: The ACM Digital Library

• Production of journals -- SGML throughout. Delivery to users -- HTML or PDF.

• Five years' back-issues as bit-mapped page images. Retrospective conversion under discussion.

• Contents pages and abstracts open access. Full text requires subscription or pay per article.

• Plan is to eliminate paper journals at some date.

Successor to Mercury, CORE, and Tulip projects


Open Access Publishing

• Internet drafts and RFC series

• Physics pre-print archives at Los Alamos

• Netlib mathematical software

• D-Lib Magazine

• NCSTRL library of computer science reports

Digital library collections published by researchers for themselves and their colleagues.

Funded by grants or other independent sources.


The Installed Technical Base

Publishers want their materials to be widely accessible.Therefore they use common denominator technology.

• E-mail

• FTP

• World Wide Web

These mature technologies are now legacy systems.

Corporation For NationalResearch InitiativesFunction

Cost of adoption SGML

HTML

Dienst

Web crawler

Harvest gatherer

RDF

Dublin Core

Deployment of New Technology


Technical Initiatives: Authentication of Users

The issue: Penn State has a site license to ACM journals. Is Bill Arms a member of Penn State?

Starting points:

• IP address • login ID and password • campus authentication (e.g., Kerberos)

This is the subject by a project of the Coalition for Networked Information


Technical Initiatives:Digital Object Identifiers

The issue: Electronic publishing needs persistent identifiers, not URLs.

The approach:

Digital object identifiers are an example of a URN Technology is CNRI handle system Administration by International DOI Foundation Major application is references between articles

Barriers:

Browsers need extensions to support URNs


Technical Initiatives: Object Models

The issue: A reference refers to an intellectual work, e.g., a technical report. What collection of files constitutes the work? What about format variants?

Applications: • Archiving and collection management • Sales and licensing of information • Copyright registration

Approach: • Structural metadata to define objects


Technical Research Topics:Authenticity of Material

The issue:

• Content can easily be changed by error or maliciously.

• Authentication systems based on digital signatures fail if one bit changes.

• Authentication of content should be invariant over changes of font, format, encoding, and layout.

Examples:

• Copyright registration.

• International document delivery.


Technical Research Topics: Archiving

The issue: Publishers and libraries wish to archive materials for the long term, but...

• media decay, • computer systems vanish.

Approaches: • better media • refreshing bits • migration of content • emulation • archeology


Technical Research Topics: Disseminations

The issue: Electronic publishing today uses the web model: transfer typed data to user's computer, render it locally.

What about: • Presentation profiles? • Interactive simulations? • Searching with human in the loop? • Reactive agents?


From the Soap Box

University computing has been a consistent leader in introduction of advanced computing:

e.g., time sharing, networking, distributed computing, e-mail, web, ...

Universities are ideally suited to introduce the new technology of electronic publishing:

• Large coherent body of need -- critical mass

• User community that welcomes (some) change

• Technical expertise

• Access to resources


From the Soap Box

Publication of research has a fundamental tension between

authors and publishers:

• Authors want their work read -- open access. • Publishers want to make money -- closed access.

Publishers are making huge profits by restricting access

to research!


From the Soap Box (continued)

Principles:

• Research information should be open access • but... requires professional managers, who need to be paid.

Universities can act together!


From the Soap Box: the Last Word

Electronic publishing should transform the way that we carry out education and research,

not

replicate traditional forms in a different medium.


Technical Issues

in

Electronic Publishing

Corporation for National Research Initiatives

William Y. Arms

Corporation For National Research Initiatives Technical Issues in Electronic Publishing Corporation...

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