FEATURE
An EPIC Effort Wedding scholarly journals to the
Internet
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Columbia project is pioneering a new breed of academic
publishing. By wedding scholarly journals to the Internet, the
Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) has created
online resource centers for international affairs, earth science
and history and is planning others that interest both lay people
and experts.
The
idea is to bring information alive in multimedia, one-stop-shopping
style Web sites. The sites, available to subscribers, bring a vast
database of field-specific research together with original
articles, news, teaching materials and visuals.
"Everything came out of asking faculty here and at other
schools: 'What are you doing in your classes and in your research?
What do you need?'" says Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC. "What
scholars say they want is a place they can get the best materials
in their field, regardless of the form they're in."
EPIC
is a not-for-profit organization based on campus and run in
partnership with the Columbia University Press, AcIS (the
university's computing center) and the libraries. It was the
brainchild of Wittenberg, former editor in chief of Columbia
University Press, who was responding to the problem of less and
less academic material making it into print. The sites are run by
scholarly advisory boards and staff at Columbia, and are subscribed
to by libraries, other universities, government offices, research
institutes and news agencies.
"We're interested in how the digital environment can enhance
and improve teaching and learning and research in particular
fields," Wittenberg says. "The value of the projects is that they
aggregate volumes of material."
They
also increase the general audience for scientific and scholarly
research by putting the material in a form more accessible than a
two-dimensional journal article that realistically is only sought
out by motivated individuals in the field. Because electronic
publishing is more efficient and less expensive than print, EPIC
hopes to increase the amount of research that is
published.
EPIC's first full-scale project was CIAO, Columbia
International Affairs Online (www.ciaonet.org), which launched in
the fall of 1997 and has become a prodigious source of news and
research for international affairs. Every month, what CIAO's editor
deems the most important development in the field is introduced in
an essay and explored in related articles. The featured topic at
press time was Afghanistan and the Taliban. In addition, the site
includes a searchable database of working papers, conference
materials, journal abstracts, full-text books, maps, a schedule of
meetings, economic data and links to other sites.
"One
of the things that makes CIAO distinctive is that it pulls together
current working papers from most of the world's top research
institutes on international affairs," says Robert and Renee Belfer
Professor of International Relations Jack Snyder, a former chair of
the political science department. "This means that subscribers to
CIAO can get a picture of current research on global issues as it
is emerging rather than waiting months, or longer, for the research
to appear in journals or books."
In
December 1999 the second site was launched as Columbia Earthscape
(www.earthscape.org). The
site works much like CIAO, but with information on earth sciences.
It publishes a quarterly magazine, Earth Affairs, that is
only available online, and posts news and video from sources such
as its partners, ABC News and the American Museum of Natural
History.
"The
shared material may have significant scientific advantage beyond
seeing a news report," says Paul Dolan, executive director of ABC
News International and a board member of Columbia's Center for
Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC). "ABC sends a
helicopter to cover a volcano, and that picture may be 20 seconds
on the evening news, but a volcanologist may want to look at it for
20 minutes, zooming in and out."
In
addition to the resources for scholars and policy-makers, the site
is an educational resource both for schools and lay people who have
access. "It's drawing a lot of interest from the high school
level," Wittenberg says. "They say they want access to the real
data, even if they have to provide more background" to their
students. For example, high school classes are tapping into the
"How an Earthquake Works" section, which is designed for
undergraduate-level courses.
Providing more in-depth information to non-experts is an aim
shared by Fathom, the for-profit educational site started by
Columbia. EPIC is providing some material for Fathom to use in its
general-access areas.
A
third project is Gutenberg-e, which takes history dissertations
that win electronic book awards from the American Historical
Association and puts them online in an enriched format. Rather than
just posting the text, Gutenberg-e gives the writers a semester off
(with the help of a $20,000 grant from the AHA) and helps them
develop interesting ways to present their material using the
multimedia capabilities of the Internet. The site will be launched
in the spring of 2001 and will be reachable by a link from www.epic.columbia.edu.
For
an e-book that is based on interviews with women in rural Africa,
for example, the reader sees a montage of pictures of the villages
on the title page, can access excerpts from other works, and may be
able to see video or hear audio clips of the interviews.
Six
dissertations receive the award every year, specifically in fields
of history that are becoming endangered. That is, with the
relatively small readership of dissertations in book form and their
high cost from academic publishers, fewer of them are making it
into print. Gutenberg-e seeks to become an alternative way to
publish scholarly work, though it may take some time before
electronic publishing is as highly regarded as printing.
"A
lot of senior faculty on tenure review committees are concerned
about online having the same weight as print," Wittenberg says.
"But if they're peer-reviewed, they're peer-reviewed. We'll try to
change how online publishing is viewed."
That
the award is given by the American Historical Association adds
prestige to the project, Wittenberg says. She says she would like
to see the site eventually expand to a place where people go for
materials, similar to Earthscape and CIAO.
The
not-for-profit sites were launched with funding from the Provost's
office as well as grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National
Science Foundation and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resource Coalition. They are designed to be self-supporting through
subscription fees ranging from $295 (for individuals) to $1,200 per
year. CIAO, starting its fourth year, already has achieved a level
of self-support.
EPIC
is currently planning resource sites for several other fields. "I
think universities and presses need to move in this direction,"
Wittenberg says. "The commercial sector will do it if we don't -
and it won't be as good."
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