Chapter 10
DIGITAL PUBLISHING AND
THE KNOWLEDGE PROCESS
Colin Steele
-
Chapter Overview
The digital information environment has ensured that the twenty-first
century will be a global watershed, like that of the fifteenth century in the
Western world, for changes in the creation of, access to, and distribution
of knowledge and information. Changes, however, are not being adequately
reflected in the formal frameworks of scholarly publishing. In the digital
information environment, the challenges will be significant, ranging from
information overload to a multimedia non-linear access to information.
Developments in the public and private web reflect the tensions of initiatives
and consequent challenges, such as those currently being experienced between
the increasing aggregation of multinational publishers on the one hand, and
open access initiatives on the other.
Globally, lsquo;publish or perishrsquo; pressures have increased on researchers, with
the need for publication becoming the pathway to success in the all-important
research assessment exercises which lead to tenure and promotion. The book
and the article are no longer intrinsically a means of distributing knowledge.
Depending on onersquo;s viewpoint of the lsquo;Faustian bargainrsquo; between authors
and publishers, the scholarly publishing environment has been in crisis for
a number of years.While this has been particularly reflected in the debates on serials, many humanities scholars have experienced declining sales of their monographs and a lack of appropriate outlets for their research publications. While many traditional university presses have been closing down or losing money for a number of years, new models are emerging with different philosophies
and capitalizing on new electronic settings. User studies have indicated that print-on-demand (POD) is universally seen as an essential requirement of
output in these models.
Open access initiatives have seen the creation of a number of ePrint
repositories which in turn have organically led to the establishment of
ePresses. Future scholarly publishing patterns will be heavily influenced by
author attitudes to ePublishing. Major programs of scholarly advocacy in the
context of scholarly communication processes will need to be implemented
if scholarly authors, their institutions and their research output are to benefit
from the new digital frameworks.
2. Background
Before examining current trends in digital publishing, an historical
framework needs to be provided, however briefly, of the nature of knowledge
access and the patterns of textual publishing. The contemporary sources of
knowledge in contrast to the past are now multiple, multi-dimensional and
often non-textual.
First we must reaffirm the well-known adage that information is not
knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. In historical terms, access to
knowledge was essentially oral in the first millennium. For much of the
second it was textual, following the introduction of the printing press in the
fifteenth century in the Western world by Johannes Gutenberg. By the year
1500 there were nearly 1,500 print shops. Eight million volumes had been
printed comprising 23,000 titles (Eisenstein, 1979, p. 44). A major shift in the ability to disseminate knowledge and information had occurred.
We now need to examine the nature of authorship and readership. In the
medieval era, scholars were often indifferent to the original creator. Copying
and, what might be termed explicit or implicit plagiarism, went hand in hand
and it was thus often difficult to ascribe particular passages to particular
authors. Textual integrity was enforced in a generic sense by the state and
ecclesiastical authorities in order to ensure orthodoxy. It is ironic in this context that the authority of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century was severely challenged by the European Reformation of Martin Luther and John Calvin.
The message of dissent was propagated and accelerated through the printed
book revolution.
In a less obviously revolutionary context, a variety of supplementary
organizational knowledge devices appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries which now we take for granted; examples are indexes, numbered
pages and bibliographies, although not all of these appeared simultaneously.
Examining the printing of Shakespearersquo;s First Folio (1623) reveals the various
textual variations of print production and the nature of lsquo;best textrsquo; at that
time. The ubiquity of web sources will impact on textual veracity in the
twenty-first century. The eighteenth century Enlightenment was a periodin which the storage and communication of information accelerated with
the developments of the encyclopaedia, learned societies, and scientific and
literary salons which led ultimately to the late nineteenth century movement
for bibliographic organization and public domain documentation. Metadata
standards are directly related to this latter process.
The intellectual strands of today are derived from the historical models of
yesterday. Thus, in the Middle Ages, every monastery was its own publishing
house and a monk with a desk, ink and parchment was almost his own publisher
because of the individual nature of creation, although the output was clearly
lsquo;brandedrsquo; in an ecclesiastical framework. A sixth century monk exhorted his
colleagues “he who does not turn up the earth with his plough ought to write
the parchment with his fingers”.
Today, every writer on the Internet can be his or her own publisher,
admittedly with qualifications as to th
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