Libraries Faculty Newsletter Fall 2003 Faculty Contribution: Scholarly Electronic Publishing

For 500 years, scholars have communicated with the broader world mainly via printed text, that is via books and scholarly journals. In the past 10 years, however, we have been witnessing a revolution in the means of scholarly commu-nication. Scholarly publishing via telecommunications, and specifically the world wide web (WWW), is allowing scholars to communicate not just among them-selves, but also with the broader world, with a speed, capacity, reach, and impact heretofore impossible. In this commentary, we summarize some of our own publishing experience in these respects. We are both professors in the Lynch School of Education, so most of our examples come from the realm of educational research and publishing. Since this newsletter is intended for the broader community of Boston College faculty, staff and students, we also summarize a little of what we know of “epublishing ” across the arts, sciences and humanities. In conclusion, we comment briefly on the issue of scholarly “standards, ” which often seems to arise at a time when anyone with Internet access can “publish” anything they want to the entire WWW world. Speed Our first experience in publishing research findings via a scholarly on-line journal nicely illustrates this feature of electronic publishing. We refer to “Testing writing on computers: An experiment compar-ing student performance on tests conducted via computer and via paper-and-pencil, ” published in Educa-tion Policy Analysis Archives in January 1997. Under the editorship of Gene V Glass for ten years, Educa-tion Policy Analysis Archive