Corporation For National Research Initiatives Technical Issues in Electronic Publishing Corporation for National Research Initiatives William Y. Arms

Corporation For National Research Initiatives Overview Examples of electronic publishing The installed technical base Technical initiatives Technical research topics From the soap box

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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.

Corporation For National Research Initiatives The Installed Technical Base Publishers want their materials to be widely accessible. Therefore they use common denominator technology. FTP World Wide Web These mature technologies are now legacy systems.

Corporation For National Research Initiatives Function Cost of adoption SGML HTML Dienst Web crawler Harvest gatherer RDF Dublin Core Deployment of New Technology

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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.

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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?

Corporation For National Research Initiatives From the Soap Box University computing has been a consistent leader in introduction of advanced computing: e.g., time sharing, networking, distributed computing, , 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

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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!

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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!

Corporation For National Research Initiatives 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.

Corporation For National Research Initiatives Technical Issues in Electronic Publishing Corporation for National Research Initiatives William Y. Arms