Early Modern Literary Studies: Preparing for the Long Run

paper
Authorship
  1. 1. Matthew Steggle

    Sheffield Hallam University

Work text
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Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS)1 is a peer-reviewed
online journal publishing articles on all aspects of early modern
literature. No registration or subscription is required, and it is
available for free to anyone anywhere in the world with access
to a web browser. All articles which are submitted to it undergo
double-blind peer review, but those which are successful are
usually published within less than a year of submission: a
process much faster than comparable print journals. Since its
foundation in 1994 EMLS has published over a hundred and
fifty scholarly articles, and over two hundred and fifty reviews
of books, films, plays, and multimedia products. In a typical
week, its servers appear to record around 6,000 different readers
in perhaps eighty different countries.
But although it is a veteran in terms of the internet, it is still a
newcomer in a relatively slow-moving field where many of its
rival print journals have pedigrees going back over a century.
This paper reviews the progress of the journal since its
foundation in 1995, and asks how a project like this one should
be preparing for a long-term future.
The most obvious forms of this problem relate to questions of
formatting and archiving. This paper will describe EMLS's
involvement with different forms of archiving system including
the National Library of Canada and the Stanford University
LOCKSS project2, a project to create multiple caches of the
journal's contents at research libraries around the world. The
paper will also review EMLS's policies around file formats,
principally proprietary formats, HTML, and XML, and
problems around revision policies.
But equally important to the journal's long-term future are the
systems for determining its current success or otherwise. In
particular, methods for determining the success of a commercial
website typically include raw number of hits recorded; revenue
generated through subscriptions and advertizing; and sales
resulting directly or indirectly from the site. Methods for
determining the success of an academic journal typically include
print run; citation of articles in it elsewhere; and peer
recognition among leading experts in the field. By which of
these sets of standards should an academic website seek to
measure its success? Or must a new set of standards be
developed to describe this activity? This paper details the results
of research into EMLS's readership statistics (raw statistics
online at <http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/stats/>
), addressing the question of what can and can't be deduced
from them, before moving on to a consideration of other forms
of esteem factor in terms of their effect in an institutional
context.
If scholarly electronic publishing is to have a long-term future,
it needs to be able to sustain publications over a scale of decades
rather than merely years. This paper will conclude with
recommendations for how to achieve longevity in an electronic
publication.
1. <http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html>
2. <http://lockss.stanford.edu/>
Bibliography
Dyck, Paul, R.G. Siemens, Jennifer Lewin, and Joanne
Woolway Grenfell. "The Janus-Face of Early Modern Literary
Studies: Negotiating the Boundaries of Interactivity in an
Electronic Journal for the Humanities." Early Modern Literary
Studies 5.3 / Special Issue 4 4 (2000): 1-20. <http://pur
l.oclc.org/emls/05-3/dslwemls.html>
Heimpel, Rod. "Legitimizing Electronic Scholarly Publication:
A Discursive Proposa." Computing in the Humanuties Working
Papers A.15 (October, 2000): . <http://www.chass.u
toronto.ca/epc/chwp/heimpel2/>
Keller, Michael A., Vicky Reich, and Andrew Herkovic. "What
is a library anymore anyway?" First Monday 8.5 (2003): .
<http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8
_5/keller/index.html>
McCarty, Willard. "Changing Shape: The On-line Journal as
a Scholarly Resource." (Panel abstract) DRH 97 Proceedings.
St. Anne's College, Oxford. September 14-17, 1997.
Reich, Vicky, and David S. H. Rosenthal. "LOCKSS: A
Permanent Web Publishing and Access System." D-Lib
Magazine 7.6 (June 2001): . <http://www.dlib.org/
dlib/june01/reich/06reich.html>

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Conference Info

In review

ACH/ALLC / ACH/ICCH / ALLC/EADH - 2005

Hosted at University of Victoria

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

June 15, 2005 - June 18, 2005

139 works by 236 authors indexed

Affiliations need to be double checked.

Conference website: http://web.archive.org/web/20071215042001/http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/achallc2005/

Series: ACH/ICCH (25), ALLC/EADH (32), ACH/ALLC (17)

Organizers: ACH, ALLC

Tags
  • Keywords: None
  • Language: English
  • Topics: None