Editor’s Note

Rebecca Welzenbach and Shana Kimball

Refurbishing the Camelot of Scholarship: How to Improve the Digital Contribution of the PDF Research Article

John Willinsky, Alex Garnett, and Angela Pan Wong

The Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the standard and preferred form for the digital edition of scholarly journal articles. Originally created as a solution to the need to “view and print anywhere,” this technology has steadily evolved since the 1990s. However, its current use among scholarly publishers has been largely restricted to making research articles print-ready, and this greatly limits the potential capacity of the PDF research article to form a greater part of a digital knowledge ecology. While this article considers historical issues of design and format in scholarly publishing, it also takes a very practical approach, providing demonstrations and examples to assist publishers and scholars in finding greater scholarly value in the way the PDF is used for journal articles. This involves but is not limited to graphic design and bibliographic linking, the deployment of metadata and research data, and the ability to combine elements of improved machine and human readability.

Social Media: New Editing Tools or Weapons of Mass Distraction?

Agata Mrva-Montoya

Despite the exponential rise of social media use in the publishing industry, very little is known about its impact on the editing profession. The aim of this paper is to investigate how editors and proofreaders use social media tools in their work. The first part is a descriptive study of users and uses of social media in the context of editing. The second part critically evaluates the positive and negative aspects of using social media tools for work and explores practical implications. The results of a survey of 330 editors and proofreaders indicate that the use of social media tools is motivated chiefly by the interpersonal utility and information-seeking behavior. While social media tools are seen as easy to use, their perceived usefulness varies. Moreover, they are considered to be time consuming and distractive. Other concerns, and indeed barriers to the adoption of social media, are linked with the blending of professional and private identity, the merging of working and personal life, and issues surrounding privacy and author’s confidentiality.

Publisher-Library Partnership for Accessibility: A Case Study of Scholarly Publishing for Public Audiences

Mark Anderson-Wilk and Sue Kunda

Public outreach and access are becoming more and more important across institutions of higher education. Sustainable information technology approaches are necessary to communicate and preserve public education materials generated as part of this new era of “outreach and engagement.” This paper describes the partnership between Oregon State University’s Extension Service publishing arm and the Oregon State University Libraries to make Oregon State University the first land-grant institution to systematically publish outreach materials using the university’s institutional repository. This partnership models how institutional repositories can be used to publish outreach products developed through faculty scholarship; the university’s outreach materials are thus simultaneously digitally preserved and made discoverable and accessible to a wide public audience. Intra-institutional partnerships, such as the one described in the case study, can be mutually beneficial in the current environment of limited resources and desire for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Review of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith

Amelia Chesley