The E-Press has started its operation by publishing articles on a one-by-one basis. These are articles of the same kind as can be found in journals and in quality conference proceedings. Articles are organized into series, so there is e.g. a series called ``Linköping Electronic Articles in Mechanical Engineering''.
In addition, there are concrete plans for publishing a journal (namely, the Student Journal of Health Sciences) as well as master's theses in one area, namely Economics and Administration. Publication of Ph.D. and licentiate theses is also being discussed, but these plans are less advanced.
E-Press publication is suitable for articles where the author has ways of reaching the intended reader community, and less suitable for those cases where the subscription list of a journal is the way of reaching readers. One case which is suitable for E-Press publication is for articles in specialized fields with a well defined research community where "everyone knows everyone else", and for papers which are primarily written for other members of the same community. However, it is also suitable e.g. if the author writes for his or her colleagues in industry, and has ways of telling them about the existence of the article and its location on the Internet.
A third case where E-Press publication may be suitable is if you are starting up research in a new area which does not fit readily into any of the existing categories, even internationally. In such cases you may have trouble getting a paper published in existing journals. Also, even if it is published it may not be observed by others who enter the same field, simply because they do not read the same periodicals. Since in such cases you will anyway have to identify your peers, build your own network, and tell them of your publications, you may as well use E-Press publication whereby these publications are maximally available to the peers.
Two kinds of E-Press publication must then be distinguished:
To make it more easily accessible to the world. All journals are not in every library in the world. With increasing subscription rates, university libraries are forced to cut down on the number of subscriptions. And even if the journal is in the library, it is often more convenient for a researcher to access an article via the WWW than by going to the library. If she wants her own copy of it, it is more convenient to print it out from the computer than to copy it, page by page, from the journal issue.
Notice, however, that the copyright transfer or permission to publish that you signed with the publisher when they received the article, may restrict your right to republish your article electronically. The E-Press is careful not to violate any such agreement. For the future, we recommend all researchers at LiU to modify their publication agreements so that they explicitly retain the right to make the article electronically available.
You may of course also consider putting the article on-line on your department's WWW or FTP server. The advantage with using the E-Press is that it takes care of some administration and guarantees to the world that the article does not change over time. (More about this in the answer to the last question).
We do not recommend the E-Press as an alternative to a journal; the idea is that you use the E-Press as the first publication but also submit it to a journal (or to a quality conference, for disciplines where good conferences have a status similar to journals).
The advantages as well as the possible complications with this differ between disciplines. It is therefore not obvious that first publication by E-Press is meaningful in all fields. The following are the considerations that you have to evaluate in your own context.
It must be realized, first of all, that the purpose of the E-Press is to do unrefereed electronic publication. When something comes out of the E-Press, it has been published, but it has not been subject to the confidential peer review on the international level that predominates in natural science, engineering, and medicine since about 50 years. This does not mean that we think peer review is unnecessary, only that we think it can be done after the first publication of the article.
There are three advantages with this kind of E-Press publication:
Article series are set up when there is a concrete interest from an authoring community, and a senior faculty member (full professor, or equivalent) accepts to be the series editor. The following series have been started at present (April, 1997):
Two answers:
The series editor has a responsibility that published articles are worth publishing.
With respect to international peer review, which provides a more definitive review than the local quality control, we foresee a two-step publication process along the following lines:
That depends on them; the E-Press has no objections. Publication practices vary between fields, and what is possible in one field may not be so in another one. We have checked this for some journals and conferences in computer science and AI: some say "no", some say "no problem", and in some cases the editor says "I don't think there will be any problem".
The choice of policy is up to you. If you have one particular journal in mind, if your only priority is to get your article into that journal, and if you don't want to take any risks, then you should first check the journal's policy with respect to previous unrefereed publication and act accordingly. Chances are that the journal will say no, and then you have to refrain from E-Press publication.
The disadvantage for you in this case is that you may have to wait quite a long time for publication (but this also varies greatly between disciplines), and that your article is in an unpublished and uncitable state meanwhile, which means that you may lose priority.
On the other hand, if you know of at least one respectable journal which is willing to receive works with the status of previous unrefereed publication, then you are well advised to publish the work in the E-Press, and then to send it to that journal and, at the same time, to make your own publicity for the work so that your colleagues get to know it. In this case, the journal publication serves as a kind of authorization, but it is not the major distribution mechanism.
By your "promotion" activities. The E-Press will not produce anything that corresponds to the sales brochures of ordinary publishers, and we do not expect anyone to read the list of "recent publications from the Linköping E-Press" in the same way as one reads the table of contents in a journal issue. Instead, the E-Press simply makes scientific works publicly available; it is up to the authors in each area to find ways of making their work known to the world.
This is the reason for the statement, in the answer to the first question above, that E-Press publication is suitable for articles where the author has his or her own ways of reaching the intended reader community, and less suitable if that is not the case.
Promotion activities for research articles are usually best made by an established research group with good international contacts. However, as discussed above, anyone who builds up research in a new area must make these promotion activities anyway, regardless of how he or she publishes the research results.
Yes, both on paper and electronically. The E-Press makes a commitment to keep papers on-line on the Internet for at least 25 years from the date of publication. Also, paper copies of the article are archived as regular publications in the Royal Library (KB) in Stockholm and in the University Library in Lund, like all other works published in Sweden. Finally, one copy goes into the Linköping University archive. (These three copies are made on archive quality paper).
The first thing is to get in touch with the series editor of the series where you plan to publish. Different series editors may wish to run their operation in different ways.
Next, unless your series editor tells you otherwise, think about what text preparation system you wish to use for the article. The following alternatives exist:
Latex. All the articles that were published during 1996 (the first year of operation of the E-Press) were produced using Latex, so in this case the procedure is well established. Basically, you write your article in the usual way, add a few extra commands at the beginning which indicate e.g. the series, the year, and the running number within the series, and then run it through Latex using the special Latex style for the series in question.
Plain text (looking like typewriter text). In this case, the manuscript will need some work in order to obtain the printed look according to the pattern desired by the E-Press. The E-Press does not provide that service, but supposes that one or more service providers will develop which can help with such things.
IDA (the Department of computer and information science) has recently created a separate unit called EMTEK which will provide such a service but against a fee. We expect that others will follow.
Word. There are two possibilities. The most natural way is to use a style file that adapts the Word document to the E-Press style. This requires, however, that the document has been written in a ``structured'' way, and for example that headlines are properly marked as headlines and not simply as single lines of boldface text.
Another possibility is to generate a plain-text version of the article, and then to take the help of a service provider.
Framemaker. Similar as for Word.
HTML. An additional possibility is to write the article using a WWW authoring tool, such as Hot Metal. One has to restrict oneself to the most basic structuring operations, such as heading levels, choice of italics and boldface, etc. In this way, one can see the article in WYSIWYG style as it is being edited, and one can immediately make it available to others over the WWW. EMTEK offers tools whereby such manuscripts can be conveniently transformed to publishable form.
The E-Press has no preference for or against any of these software tools; its only concern is that published articles should have a reasonably uniform look, at least within each series. The E-Press may publish articles in postscript, PDF, and HTML format.
No, there is no way that you can change the original article that the E-Press maintains on the net. You can not even change a trivial spelling error in it. The reason for this is that the credibility of the E-Press requires that published research results are not ``improved'' by their author some time after the date of publication, and the E-Press has taken various measures to guarantee that no publication is tampered with. We do not have any way of distinguishing between trivial and nontrivial changes in a secure way. It is a principle for the E-Press that what has been published, has been published.
What you can do as an author, however, is to attach additional information to the article. You can attach an errata list. You can also attach a revised version of the article, where you have inserted the corrections according to the errata list. Technically, it works as follows: each article is represented by a URL (one of these expressions starting with http:). If you visit that URL using a web browser, you get to see a cover page for the article, containing its author, its title, its abstract (if it is not too long), etc, and links to the real contents of the article. These links can be of three types:
Conversely, if the cover page contains links both to the original version and to an author-provided revised version, then the normal reader is well advised to use the revised article, but the reader who wants to make sure what was originally published (for example in the context of a priority discussion) should go back to the E-Press original version.
Any language. We expect of course that Swedish and English language texts will predominate, but German, French, Russian, etc. are welcome too.