Electronic Journal Hosting

I have been toying around with electronic journal hosting initiative for some time. Once we planned to set jurnaldigital.com with some commercial model, then the idea of Indonesian online dissertation and theses (similar with PQDT – ProQuest Dissertation and Theses).

None of them are easy. Both are challenges.

Indonesian scientific journals are published mostly by universities as part of their three pilars of function, and hence, very much for the sake of Higher Education General Directorate’s accreditation. This would include minimum printrun of 300 copies (yes! print!) with 300 subscribers (must have proof of receipt shown!).

Electronic journals? It’s just web site companion of the print version, at its best. Airlangga University has tried to go beyond that, but it still has a long way to go.

As for Online Dissertation and Theses, the main stumbling block is ownership of the papers. Libraries are not willing to let their dissertation and theses collection out of their premises. At best they give online access to the full texts using a special reader that would prohibit the files to be downloaded. This is the case with Petra Christian University, Surabaya. The others? You’re lucky to be able to browse the titles, but not the abstracts (let alone full texts).

At the end of this exhaustive search for some business model, we have decided to:

1. Postpone the Online Dissertation and Theses initiative and work with libraries in promoting OAI (Open Archive Initiative) instead. This would be in form of seminar, workshop or training for librarians or university’s IT personnels. Petra Christian University (Surabaya) and Atma Jaya University (Jakarta) has shown some interest and we may have the first seminar in January 2008.

2. Establish online journal hosting as a free service, as an extension to existing businesses. My colleague from Graha Ilmu Publisher will have http://jurnaldigital.com (which I planned to be in but not at the end) and myself will have Discovery Indonesia Journal Hosting (http://journal.discoveryindonesia.com). Both beta versions are available for browsing). I’m lucky to have my first hosted journal from Surabaya (Berkala Penelitian Hayati – Journal of Biological Researches) and soon another one from Bogor (Jurnal Teknologi & Industri Pangan – Food Science & Technology Journal).

Loosely related to this is my initiative for education materials hosting and sharing, which idea can be read from http://www.edu2000.org (Sorry folks! This site is Bahasa Indonesia only) and the archive of the late Neotek magazine (http://www.neotek.co.id). I might soon prepare a searchable repository for this archive. It might be part of edu2000.org initiative.