Rethinking Electronic Publishing : ELPUB 2009 (Preface)

It is a pleasure for us to present to you readers, speakers and attendants with these proceedings, consisting of over 40 contributions accepted for presentation at the 13th ELPUB conference. This year the conference was generously hosted by CILEA and the University of Milan in Italy and chaired by Susanna Mornati, CILEA, Italy and Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. It is well known that Internet publishing is continuously changing and taking new forms and models. As players on the market for electronic publishing, we have to be forerunners in shaping the coming models. In line with this, the theme of the conference this year was ?Rethinking electronic publishing? with a subtitle urging us to be innovative in discussing new communication paradigms and related technologies. The focus of ELPUB 2009 is on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts. The three-day event consists of a first day of technical workshops, tutorials and demonstrations; the following two days feature contributed papers and posters examining a broad range of technical, conceptual, policy, and financial aspects of scholarly communication while showcasing significant experiences and lessons learnt. A symposium on openness in the academic environment run by Leslie Chan and Gale Moore, and special keynotes by Henk Moed and Simon Tanner enrich the programme.The 13th ELPUB conference carries on the tradition of previous conferences held in United Kingdom (1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008). A conference on electronic publishing naturally offers the collection of papers of earlier conferences, fully archived in a sustainable digital library at http://elpub.scix.net. The library has also been expanded with a citation index (i.e. collection of references in the ELPUB papers). More than 3,200 citations have been collected in over 500 records, starting with the very first ELPUB conference in 1997. Bob Martens has made a great effort in extracting citations from earlier ELPUB papers to make an analysis of the impact of ELPUB papers within the community. It seems that within this collection there appear to be only a relatively small number of citations of other ELPUB papers; the reason for this is under investigation. However, there might be a reason to emphasize the existing archive of earlier papers to the audience. Central research questions of today might have also been already tackled in earlier conference papers.We are proud to present a variety of contributions from five different continents, thus representing a wide geographical distribution of issues and themes related to electronic publishing. Emerging countries are witnessing the diffusion of innovations in scholarly communication, as well as developed countries. ELPUB is an event that makes these trends meet. We hope to contribute to reducing the information divide among countries and continents in the world. Among the topics, economic models hold a significant place in a market where new players are changing the traditional landscape. There is ever growing interest towards semantics, tagging, web 3.0 and all the techniques which will change the way machines present contents and help with their selection and re-aggregation. Open access models are consolidating their status; digital libraries are merging with journals; new metrics change evaluation parameters; preservation becomes more and more an issue within sustainability. Innovation is the common umbrella under which all papers contribute their effort.This year we introduce a new category of short papers. It is meant as a chance to present a brief update on an interesting situation, a success story, or showcase a significant experience. We hope that delegates and readers will enjoy this chance to meet a variety of examples and practices to draw inspiration for their initiatives.In order to guarantee the high quality of papers, all submissions (over 80) to the ELPUB conference were peer-reviewed by members of the international Programme Committee and additional peer reviewers. Their contribution and feedback to the authors was valuable and appreciated. We would like to express our gratitude and appreciation for their effort and help in the review process and in suggestions for the programme of the conference. As in the previous editions, we still propose printed proceedings. In the last few years the irony of printing contributions about electronic publishing was highlighted. But we are addressing, among others, a conservative academic world and it seems important to produce a tangible record of the ELPUB intellectual output for research evaluation.We hope you enjoy reading the proceedings. It is also our pleasure to invite delegates and readers to ELPUB 2010, which will take place in Helsinki, Finland. The 14th ELPUB conference will be organised by the Hanken School of Economics. Details of the conference will be forthcoming at the ELPUB web site.Our thanks go to Nilde de Paoli and Anna Marini for their invaluable support, to Julia Weekes for copyediting, to Angela Corgnale for layout editing, to Vania Ug?, Roberto Piazzola and many other colleagues at CILEA who made this event possible and to whom we express our gratitude. A special mention to Luigi Traiano at Nuova Cultura in Rome, who made this publication possible, and an intense gratitude to Paola Galimberti at the University of Milan, for her scientific advice. Finally, we would like to acknowledge and thank the various sponsors for their generous contributions.We look forward to an interesting and productive conference