Scholarly electronic publishing

Scientists publish their research results in scientific journals, in conference proceedings, as reports etc. Print publishing has been and still is the dominant form for dissemination of scientific results, but recently - thanks to the Internet and the WWW - electronic publishing has gained a strong position either as a parallel form to the print publishing or as an independent publishing format.

The pioneers in dissemination of scientific reports via the networks were the high energy physicists. The physicists were the ones to start the WWW! The High Energy Physics database in Stanford (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/FIND/hep) provides access to a large amount of articles, conference papers and reports in the field, the most recent ones being preprints of journal articles.

Recently also publishers of scientific journals have started to provide electronic versions of their journals. Most publishers offer the electronic versions to the subscribers of the printed versions at some additional cost. The publishers use a variety of file formats and distribution methods for their journals.

“Optical storage medium and the Internet offer, however, possibilities which are not possible on paper-based medium. These features include, hypertext links, multimedia and hypermedia. Using these capabilities the scientists could convey their message to their colleagues and other users of information much better than is possible with papers. For more than a century scientists (of the Gutenberg era) have been taught how to write "papers". Now, it is time to go beyond the paper and start using new methods for visualising research results and communicating this information to others. As the scientists are conservative they should be woken: stop writing papers, take advantage of the new information technology!” (Sauli Laitinen at the opening of the Seminar on Multimedia Scholarly Publishing, Espoo 29.5.1997, http://www.vtt.fi/inf/nordep/proceedings/epsem97/)

VTT Information Service acts as the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Electronic Publishing (NordEP) (http://www.vtt.fi/inf/nordep/) nominated by NORDINFO. In this capacity e.g. a guide for UNESCO on putting electronic journals on the web (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/participer/guidelines/index.htm) was prepared at VTT. This guide contains e.g. a review of most important file formats used in web publishing. Also copyright issues are briefly discussed in the guide. These guidelines have been applied to the publication series of VTT. A selection of reports have been made available on the web in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (http://www.inf.vtt.fi/pdf/). The publishing process is described in NORDINFO Report 1997:2 (http://www.inf.vtt.fi/pdf/misc/NORDINFO-Rapport-1997-2.pdf). The report also contains instructions how to write a scientific paper so that it is easy to convert into web format.

In the talk, the present status of scholarly electronic publishing is reviewed: what is available as far as books, scientific journals and reports are concerned. Various file formats used in electronic publishing, tools needed to read them and also to produce them are briefly discussed. Short instructions are given for how to write a technically good scientific “paper” in electronic form.

Pirkko Eskola
VTT Information Service
P.O. Box 2000
FIN-02044 VTT
pirkko.eskola@vtt.fi