1. eLanguage.net Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from academic publishing to scholarly communication *Dieter Stein, Cornelius Puschmann University of Duesseldorf [email_address] [email_address] PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007 12 July 2007

2. Contents of this presentation

eLanguage: Concept & Organization

The Technology

Where We Are

The Future: Beyond the Paper Metaphor

3. A) eLanguage: Concept and Organization 4. What is eLanguage?

an aggregator for peer-reviewed content from OA journals in Linguistics

a platform for publishing scientific articles on-line

a source of meta-information on academic Linguistics (book reviews, department news etc)

an academic community on the Web

5. Project Partners 6. FromLanguageto eLanguage

Languagestarted in 1924

roughly 7,000 individual and institutional subscribers

issues since 2001 available via Project MUSE

narrow focus due to space limitations

slow publication cycle

high production and dissemination costs

the goal was towiden the focus

while at the same timereducing costs

andfacilitating access ...an Open Access approach was the ideal solution

7. eLanguage organizational structure

the eLanguage editorial board reviews co-journal proposals

the editor in chief is responsible for the management of the platform

co-journals are independent once they have been approved

Editor in Chief Editorial Board 8. Co-journal accreditation process forms an editorial board andsubmits a proposal reviews proposal and approves or asks for revisions is admitted as an eLanguage co-journal eLanguage Editorial Board 9. Expanded organizational structure content IT services 10. B) The Technology 11. A mashup of tools OJS 2.1.1 + Wordpress 2.2 12. Data from OJS and WP aggregated on the main page blog section content (WP) co-journal content (OJS) master feed 13. Open Source Reliability

all first-level products (OJS, WP) are based on second-level FOSS technologies and protocols such as PHP, MySQL, Apache and RSS/Atom

mature, well-supported and well-documented products

90% of software development is outsourced - advantage : we can focus on the content and on making it accessible

14. Using external tools for added services

Google Domain Tools (admin)

Google Custom Search (search)

Google Mail (email)

Google Groups (mailing lists)

Google Analytics (web statistics)

Technorati (blog management)

Feedburner (feed diagnostics)

15. Three goals for maximum accessibility

to make all eLanguage content accessible via search

to make everything published in eLanguage accessible both via library catalogs and commercial search engines

to make access to ourcontentindependent from access to ourwebsiteby using feeds (everything but the full text of articles is available via feeds)

16. Benefits of the platform

Benefits for...

readers : content is free and easily accessible

authors : no costs, greater impact, faster publication, ownership of article, precise metrics

editors : full control over their publication, less or no headaches about technical issues, no volumes of specialized knowledge necessary

Linguistic Society of America : "what's good for the discipline is good for the association", great visibility

HBZ/DIPP : strategic value / experience

17. C) Where We Are 18. eLanguage Beta 19. Recent developments

as of July 2007, four journals have been accredited:

• Constructions

• • Anette Rosenbach (University of Paderborn, Germany),

• • Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabruck, Gemany)

• Journal of Mesoamerican Languages and Linguistics (JMLL)

• • David Mora-Marn (University of North Carolina, USA)

• Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT)

• • Annie Zaenen (PARC Inc / Stanford University, USA),

• • Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK),

• • Martha Palmer (University of Colorado, USA)

• Semantics & Pragmatics (S&P)

• • Kai von Fintel (Massachusetts of Technology, USA)

• • David Beaver (University of Texas, USA)

a blog has been launched to keep people informed

launch in spring/summer 2008

20. Issues

producing content takes time

many researchers have a wait and see approach to Open Access

communication must be managed well when working in a geographically dispersed team

for our needs, OJS could be simpler in terms of its UI, even if that meant less functions

21. What could we do better?

Once the platform is hugely successful we could look into...

unified citation database

preprint repository (?)

more "reader" involvement (blog comments? link external sources?)

22. D) The Future: Beyond the Paper Metaphor 23. What happens if projects like eLanguage succeed?

Let's assume that in the future...

a large percentage of all scholarly research is OA

thestorageof research data is heavily centralized in a few powerful archives

the content isannotatedmanually by its creators, as well as through automatic means (keyword extraction) and social web practices (tagging)

retrievalof this content largely takes place via commercial search engines

How does the role of academic libraries change if thestorage ,annotationandretrievalof information is realized elsewhere?

24. Publishing as the key role of the future

In the future...

archiving, enrichment and retrieval are likely to be strongly centralized,

while Net access and storage will increasingly be treated as commodities

What remains is to enablethe creation and disseminationof scholarly content as it takes new forms and becomes usable in new ways

Universities, scholarly societies and information infrastructure providers need to work together to achieve this goal

25. Thank You for listening! 26. eLanguage.net Shifting the paradigm in linguistics from academic publishing to scholarly communication *Dieter Stein, Cornelius Puschmann University of Duesseldorf [email_address] [email_address] PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007 12 July 2007