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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Research findings can now be published by anyone on the Web, but electronic journals are needed to provide scientific and scholarly filtration. Higher degree theses or dissertations are also being published electronically. This has created many new opportunities but also many insecurities over reduced access, foregone publication possibility and unwanted exposure and plagiarism. There are also technical issues confronting dissemination by electronic means, specifically, archival stability and dependency on still evolving software and technology, but the all-powerful reach of the electronic form is proving irresistible. However, the book and research paper printed on high quality paper will always be published for reasons of their intrinsic worth.
Introduction
Traditionally, research findings were published in specialized journals, and these became the arenas for scientific and scholarly debate over evidence, methodology and validity. Early scientific and scholarly publication was by a body usually under the patronage of royalty, aristocracy, church or state, such as the Academie Francaise, established in 1635, or the British Royal Society, which began publishing its Proceedings in the 17th century. In America, the American Journal of Sociology began publication in 1895, as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field. Each of these publishing bodies remained committed to the principle that research must be peer reviewed, as a guarantee of quality and authenticity. However, the process of traditional publication, with its necessarily long lead times for an exacting process, and the economic costs involved, has created a situation perceived by some to be one of "severe restriction" (Edmonds, 2000). There is another perceived problem that minority or unpopular viewpoints can be suppressed (Martin, 2001). The established journals have rejection rates sometimes as high as 90 per cent (Getz, 1997), but such is their indirect power that there is generally no difficulty in receiving submissions. In addition, individuals who wish to submit can experience problems of delay, as well as personal costs, a particularly severe problem for those in developing countries.
In contrast, in times of war and cold war, research is subject to high secrecy, as it has been in areas of intellectual property of great commercial value. It was the desire to break secrecy that led to the development of the world's first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus, in 1943 (Sale, 2005: 3).
The Electronic Dissemination of Research Findings
Since 1990, the Web has had a profound and still emerging effect on the process of research diffusion. The Web has become an extremely important medium of research and education as a primary means of disseminating research findings and information through digital libraries and electronic documents such as e-journals, e-print archives and online conference proceedings (Noruzi, 2004). In addition to these, there is the eprint (sometimes called preprint) server. The eprint has been defined...
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