Towards Scholarly HTML

Peter Sefton, Towards Scholarly HTML

Abstract

The editors of this special edition originally asked if institutional repositories are shaping and changing scholarly communications. While the Open Access movement has had a profound impact, there is at least one area where repositories are not. While repositories are Web-based, they almost always contain only print-oriented materials which are not fully realizing the fabric of the Web and its ability to link documents to each other and to data.

This article will explore some of the factors that have contributed to this print-dominated situation and then report on work undertaken at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) to make repositories more Web-like, using a publishing system which was originally devised at the university for publishing course materials to multiple formats. The article concludes with a description of a new model for changing scholarship by focusing on post-graduate theses and new journals in an open access context

Keywords: Web publishing; Word processing; Institutional repositories; Open access publishing; Australian Digital Futures Institute; Content management systems