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The Legitimacy of Electronic Scholarly Publishing Essay example

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The Legitimacy of Electronic Scholarly Publishing

At most institutions of higher learning in the United States and worldwide the emphasis is placed on the depth and breadth of the institution's research, at least as far as the institution's reputation and renown are concerned. An institution that does not produce much scholarly research in the form of conference activity or publication activity will not carry the same high regard as an institution which is much more involved in conference participation and publication. Sometimes individual state institutions are regarded as having powerful personas if they have established and maintained their university presses, but other universities do not have the funding nor the …show more content…

As scholarly electronic publishing develops as complement and competition to traditional publishing, the promotion and tenure boards at all universities will have to decide on the weight that electronic publishing will carry in annual evaluations; in essence, are electronic publications as respectable and credible as traditional publications? A number of factors determine the credibility of any publication, ranging from something as superficial as the publication’s imprint to the stability, or ability to be archived, of the publication; however, this proposal will focus on the relevance of the editorial process to the reputability of a scholarly publication, whether a book or a journal. In essence, the question proposed for research is not will electronic publishing have an impact on the scholarly publishing industry, for its impact will be presented as quite inevitable. The question is how can electronic publishing have the same impact as traditional publishing, i. e., if the author publishes an article in an e-journal or and h-journal, will this publication be given the same weight as someone else's article which has been published in a traditional print journal?

Background

The first task is to define electronic publishing. In its most basic form, electronic publishing is any type of publishing in which the final copy/version exists solely in digital format, whether as a Web site, CD-ROM, diskette,

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