Ebook: Social Shaping of Digital Publishing: Exploring the Interplay Between Culture and Technology

Since the advent of the Web, the processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing. The open access movement has been a major driver of change in recent years with regard to scholarly communication; however, changes are also evident in other fields of application such as e-government and e-learning. In most cases these changes are driven by technological advances, but there are also cases where a change in social reality pushes technological development. Both the social and mobile web and linked data are currently shaping the edge of research in digital publishing. Liquid publishing is on the more daring agendas. Digital preservation is an issue that poses great challenges which are still far from being solved. The legal issues, security and trust continue to deserve our full attention. We need new visualization techniques and innovative interfaces that will keep pace with the global dimension of information. This is the current scenario, but what will follow? What are the technologies and social and communication paradigms that we will be discussing in ten or twenty years?

ELPUB 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing, exploring the interplay between culture and technology. This makes the fact that it is being held in the European Capital of Culture for 2012, Guimarães, Portugal, all the more appropriate.

52 submissions were received for ELPUB 2012, from which 23 articles and 10 posters were accepted after peer review. Of the accepted articles, 11 were submitted as full articles and 12 as extended abstracts. These articles have been grouped into sessions on the following topics: Sessions 1 and 4 – Digital Scholarship & Publishing; Session 2 – Special Archives; Session 3 – Libraries & Repositories, Session 5 – Digital Texts & Readings, and Session 6 – Future Solutions & Innovations.

The programme features two keynote speeches. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's speech is entitled “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy”, that of Antonio Câmara is entitled “Publishing in 2021”. Finally we call your attention to the panel on e-books, which is entitled “Academic e-books – Technological hostage or cultural redeemer?”.

We believe this is another great edition of the ELPUB conference. We would like to take this opportunity to thank both the members of the ELPUB executive committee and the members of the local advisory committee, for making it happen. Together they provided valuable advice and assistance during the entire organization process. Secondly we would like to mention our colleagues on the program committee, who assured the quality of the conference through the peer review process. Last but not least, we wish to thank the local organization team for ensuring that all this effort culminates in a very interesting scientific event on the 14th and 15th of June. Thank you all for helping us to maintain the quality of ELPUB and merit the trust of our authors and attendees. We wish you all a good conference and we say farewell, hoping to see you again in Sweden in 2013!

The editors,

Ana Baptista

Peter Linde

Niklas Lavesson

Miguel A. Brito

The contemporary individual finds on the Internet and especially on the Web facilitating conditions to build a basic infrastructure based on the concept of commons. He also finds favorable conditions which allow him to collaborate and share resources for the creation, use, reuse, access and dissemination of information. However, he also faces obstacles such as Copyright (Law 9610/98 in Brazil). An alternative is Creative Commons which not only allows the elaboration, use and dissemination of information under legal conditions but also function as a facilitator for the development of informational commons. This paper deals with this scenario.

This paper presents the results of a study on the open archives in developing countries. It provides the elements of type, size and contents of open archives. The methodology is based on information collected from open repository websites. The survey is based on an almost exhaustive sample list of developing countries websites retrieved from directories and a list of open repositories. The purpose of this study, carried out from 2011 up to now, is to measure, at a second level, the impact of open access on the Algerian researchers by analyzing their practices related to open access, through the identification of their scientific publications at a second level in the open archives, in which they can deposit.

This paper addresses the relationship of copyright and the right of Technologies (ICTs) are causing many changes in the system of scientific communication, such as the creation of Institutional Repositories that aim to gather scientific production in digital format. The University needs quicker ways of spreading academic production and many questions are emerging due to contexts such as the Open Access movement. Thus, this paper questions the positioning of Universities, especially Public Universities, which despite having policies related to intellectual property to protect the transferring forms of research results to society; many times do not have a positioning or a mechanism that regulates the self-deposit of scientific production in these Institutional Repositories. In order to develop this paper, the following issues are addressed: lack of interest of the University in storing scientific production; reports on the relationship of the library with scientific publishing houses; the participation of faculty members and students in supporting the Free Access movement; and initiatives aimed at greater flexibility of copyright to the context of scientific production. In order to follow the development of these issues at international level, it was opted for qualitative research with non-participating direct observation to carry out the identification and description of copyright policy of important publishers from the ROMEO SHERPA site; therefore, it can be observed that there are changes regarding the publishers' flexibility before self-archiving of authors in open access institutional repositories in their universities. Given this scenario, we presente reflections and considerations that involve the progress and mainly the integration of the University and its faculty members; the institution should recommend and guide its faculty members not to transfer their copyrights, but to defend their right of copy to Institutional Repositories along with Publishing Houses.

This paper is intended to compare information retrieval (IR) educational goals in different academic and professional areas such as Library and Information Science (LIS) and Health Sciences (HS), analysing and identifying a shift on user seeking goals in the digital era and, eventually, on educational goals as well. It starts with a section on information literacy where several aspects are specified, such as user goals, IR systems, IR skills, information seeking strategies (queries) and user perception of search success. Another section focuses on teaching IR aspects, like IR educational goals, assessment and feedback, and e-resources in LIS and in HS. Teaching in an academic environment for academic audiences is somehow different from teaching for professional audiences even though these are located in an academic environment as well. Those are the issues and particularities that throughout the analysis of information literacy and teaching IR aspects will be explained along the full paper.

The development of ebooks for tablet devices offers a rich space for collaboration between writers and designers. This paper examines how this emerging media affects ideas around collaboration and authorship. Specifically it considers the changing role of designers in shaping meaning and content and how this may affect existing paradigms of authorship. Using class-based projects as case studies, the paper presents and discusses examples of how designers have shifted their role from historic notions of “crystal goblet” design or expressive design to genuine collaborators and authors.

The uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Web environments for creation, treatment and availability of information have supported the emergence of new social-cultural patterns represented by convergences in textual, image and audio languages. This paper describes and analyzes the National Archives Experience Digital Vaults as a digital publishing web environment and as a cultural heritage. It is a complex system – synthesizer of information design options at information setting, provides new aesthetic aspects, but specially enlarges the cognition of the subjects who interact with the environment. It also enlarges the institutional spaces that guard the collective memory beyond its role of keeping the physical patrimony collected there. Digital Vaults lies as a mix of guide and interactive catalogue to be dealt in a ludic way. The publishing design of the information held on the Archives is meant to facilitate access to knowledge. The documents are organized in a dynamic and not chronological way. They are not divided in fonds or distinct categories, but in controlled interaction of documents previously indexed and linked by the software. The software creates information design and view of documental content that can be considered a new paradigm in Information Science and are part of post-custodial regime, independent from physical spaces and institutions. Information professionals must be prepared to understand and work with the paradigmatic changes described and represented by the new hybrid digital environments; hence the importance of this paper. Cyberspace interactivity between user and the content provided by the environment design provide cooperation, collaboration and sharing knowledge actions, all features of networks, transforming culture globally.

The paper discusses some aspects of a work in progress aimed at the development of technologies for digitization of Bulgarian folk music and building a digital library with Bulgarian folk songs presented with their music, texts and notes. This library provides digital preservation of the sound recordings, lyrics and notations of more than 1000 Bulgarian folk songs and tools for various types of search and analysis of the available resources. The presentation is focused on the subject ontology especially developed for the occasion and its application in the implementation of a tool for semantics oriented search in the lyrics of songs.

Currently, the conventional communication channel for reporting scientific results is Web electronic publishing of scientific articles in paper print formats, such as PDFs. The emergence of the Semantic Web and Linked Data environment provides new opportunities for communicating, sharing, and integrating scientific knowledge in digital formats that could overcome the limitations of the current print format, which is only suitable for reading by people. The results of scientific research can be published electronically and shared in structured, interlinked formats. This integrated knowledge network could be crawled by software agents, thereby facilitating semantic retrieval, knowledge reuse, validation of scientific results, identification of traces of scientific discoveries, new scientific insights, and identification of knowledge contradictions or inconsistencies. This paper explores the possibilities of this new environment for scientific publishing and reports the implementation of a prototype semantic publishing system, which publishes scientific articles in a paper print format and publishes the claims made in the conclusions of each article as structured triples using the Resource Description Framework format.

Music sources are most commontly shared in music scores scanned or printed on paper sheets. These artifacts are rich in information, but since they are images it is hard to re-use and share their content in todays' digital world. There are modern languages that can be used to transcribe music sheets, this is still a time consuming task, because of the complexity involved in the process and the typical huge size of the original documents.

WIKI::SCORE is a collaborative environment where several people work together to transcribe music sheets to a shared medium, using the notation. This eases the process of transcribing huge documents, and stores the document in a well known notation, that can be used later on to publish the whole content in several formats, such as a PDF document, images or audio files for example.

This study is developed within the scientific areas of Information Science, Communication Sciences and Editorial Design. It refers to the hybrid publishing context in which there is a coexistence of electronic and print processes, and to the role played by Information and Communication Technologies. This scenario is conditioned by technical, morphological and cultural transformations, in the words of Roger Chartier, and represents a singular moment to observe the book and its construction processes, valuing it in its various embodiments and contexts. Considering this, the present study sought to contribute to an adaptation of the methodological tools; and an optimization of the designer's communication and information flow. In order to achieve these goals we defined two main tasks: (i) comparative analysis of traditional publishing and hybrid publishing, (ii) characterization of the designer's communication and information flows that exist in the context of hybrid publishing. To do so, we adopted qualitative research methods, with literature review and content analysis. This procedure allowed us to conclude that the publishing industry is making major investments (in what concerns organization and capital) in implementing hybrid publishing schemes. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of adequacy of design programs in this scenario. This adaptation involves a redirection of the focus of the design program, not to controlling the final shape of the object (book), but to regulating it. This procedure can only be possible with a dynamic information flow in which the editorial subject is flexible and built inside a participatory scheme by the various agents.

Cultural heritage institutions such as galleries, museums and libraries increasingly use digital media to present artifacts to their audience and enable them to immerse themselves in a cultural virtual world. With the application eXhibition: editor3D museum curators and editors have a software tool at hand to interactively plan and visualize exhibitions. In this paper we present an extension to the application that enhances the workflow when designing exhibitions. By introducing multi-touch technology to the graphical user interfaces the designing phase of an exhibition is efficiently simplified, especially for non-technical users. Furthermore, multi-touch technology offers a novel way of collaborative work to be integrated into a decision making process. A flexible export system allows to store created exhibitions in various formats to display them on websites, mobile devices or custom viewers. E.g. the widespread 3D scene standard Extensible 3D (X3D) is one of the export formats and we use it to directly incorporate a realtime preview of the exhibition in the authoring process. The combination of the tangible user interfaces with the realtime preview gives curators and exhibition planers a capable tool for efficiently presenting cultural heritage in electronic media.

This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way ANOVA analyses show that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AUPress in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AUPress, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by the number of downloads of the open electronic versions.

This paper presents the findings of the Huddersfield Open Access Publishing Project, a JISC funded project to develop a low cost, sustainable Open Access (OA) journal publishing platform using EPrints Institutional Repository software.

Between the two paths of open access - green and gold - the later is the harder to develop and has the less support from the research community. The main difficulty is about finding a sound economic model. Open Access journals usually depend on two funding sources: subsidies and/or donations from institutions and publication fees from research units in the authors-pay model. These two ways of funding open access journals and books proved effective in some cases (Plos), but are not flawless. The Center for Open Electronic Publishing, a french initiative for open access publishing in humanities and social sciences, has recently developed a new economic model based on “freemium” for its full open access journals and books series, in order to address two issues: improve their economical soundness and give them more visibility in libraries. Freemium, the contraction of “free” and “premium”, preserves open access to information together with the marketing of premium services.

In the last decades, ICT development and the use of computer networks led to major changes in the way scientists communicate the results of their researches. One of the most important transformations occurred in scholarly communication through the acceleration in the unbounded disclosure of scientific information (open access). However, the adoption of new channels varies according to the scientific areas. This study is part of an ongoing research that aims to understand the impact of digital media in the mechanisms of production and dissemination of scientific knowledge within a specific scientific community: historians. This paper will look at whether and how the history journals in Portugal are adopting electronic publishing and providing open access to their contents. To operationalise the study, thirteen R&D Units were contacted and asked to provide a list of the journals published and the format used. Furthermore, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Latindex and European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) were researched. Finally, the websites of Portuguese higher education institutions with History Departments were consulted, with the aim of identifying any periodicals that might not have been previously identified. At the end, twenty-two titles were considered. Data seems to show that universities and History R&D Units increasingly value the free electronic access to research results produced by historians.

We are suggesting a framework for open access publishing of comprehensive, elaborately structured digital textbooks, potentially enriched by extensive non-textual data. The framework will comprise of a software toolbox containing a collaborative authoring platform, manuscript workflow system, tools for editorial work, presentation platform, updating workflow, interfaces for dissemination and long-term preservation. In addition to the software toolbox itself, guidelines and standards for all aspects of digital textbook publishing, including peer review, metadata and editorial procedures, legal issues as well as a business model will be developed, resulting in a best practice guide to digital textbook publishing. The software and workflows will not be developed from scratch, but build upon existing open-source software, using the example of a scientific textbook of hand surgery as its first use case. This paper introduces the project and gives a prospectus of the proposed framework.

This paper presents the initial findings of OAPEN-UK, a UK research project gathering evidence on the social and technological impacts of an open access business model for scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences.

The main purpose of this project has been to examine the accessibility of refereed conference articles and the OA- and publishing policies of conferences in order to in this way elucidate different aspects concerning self-archiving in Swedish institutional repositories. For this purpose, the project participants have examined a number of conferences and references to conference articles via their institutional repositories during a specific time period and described these from the perspective of a common scheme. The study has showed that the local institutional repositories fill an important role to make conference publications visible. We have found that ca. 50 % of the conference papers can be published as postprints in our institutional repositories. We have noticed that ca. 15% or the studied conference articles are not available at all. It is, therefore, of great importance to use local institutional repositories as a publishing channel, not only for primary published material such as dissertations and reports, but also as a source for finding these conference articles “without a home”. Between 20-25 % of the examined articles were found in some type of OA archive; ca. half of these were found in one of the project participants' own institutional repositories. This indicates that the publishing database of respective higher education institution is an important factor for open accessibility. Ca. 10% of the conferences in the study had an explicit OA policy or expressed such a policy by openly making conference articles accessible on their conference sites. A big problem when it comes to self-archiving of conference articles is the lack of information about OA policy. The landscape of conference publishing is complex and the self-archiving of documents from conferences is very time-consuming. Above all, we would wish a policy resource for conferences similar to the SHERPA/RoMEO. At present, however, there is no other alternative than scrutinizing the conferences' copyright information to the authors and from this attempt to draw conclusions about possible self-archiving. To facilitate the future handling and classification of conference articles in Swedish institutional repositories a number of recommendations are suggested.

This paper explores the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of use of two alternative interface interactions in a mobile tablet application. More specifically, the study employs a navigation task which novice users were required to complete by means of two types of main menu button, one utilizing text and the other utilizing a visual metaphor. Furthermore, little evidence exists on the effect of the use of metaphor on users of various ages and levels of computer experience. Our results show that young users prefer buttons that display a visual metaphor in the form of an icon, in contrast to older participants, who preferred the button that employed text. They also show that the users' performance is dependent upon age.

The paper aims to present the preliminary results of a two-year project having as scope the future of the book and libraries stemming from the current reading practices in Portugal. In the scope of the project, the presentation of the findings will be focused on the mobile consumption practices in Portugal. This research is based on a mixed methodology: a quantitative survey – Network Society in Portugal – articulated with a qualitative analysis of the discourses of the representatives of what Thompson calls the publishing chain (librarians, publishing houses, authors, and content and soft/hardware providers). To understand the impact of mobile devices on reading practices is crucial for libraries and publishing houses. Mobile devices offer augmented mobility – a mobility that is connected, networked and collaborative. Although the hype is currently around eBooks, we are still faced with a market where the vast majority still reads books on paper. The sales of devices have exploded but eBooks are lagging behind. What do people use their tablets, iPads, and eReaders for? What are they reading and where? How do they articulate their readings with other media and cultural consumptions? Those are the central questions that we are aiming at answering.

Universities play an important role in lifelong learning. E-learning is one of the key elements in today's networked and knowledge oriented world. It is crucial to know whether the universities are ready to transform their courses to e-learning systems. In this paper the e-learning readiness of the academic staff of Hacettepe University Faculty of Letters (HUFL) is investigated. A 37-item questionnaire along with some demographic questions is used for obtaining the data. Results show that title might be a significant factor for e-learning readiness and in general, HUFL academic staff are not ready for the e-learning environment. The findings of this study will help to conduct a larger study throughout Turkey in order to determine a model for course of action for transition to an e-learning system.

The Biographical Portal aims to collect, organize, and make available all biographical Information that is available about Dutch people. In this paper, we describe the design process and what choices we made, the tools we used and may useful for a larger audience, and “lessons learned” - things that we feel we have done well, and things we would have done differently if we had known from the start what we know now.