Tuesday, March 4, 2003

U. of California International-Studies Program Offers Free Peer-Reviewed Articles Online By SCOTT CARLSON An international-studies division at the University of California at Berkeley has created a new online-publication program that will offer peer-reviewed academic articles to the public free through a Web site. The program, established by the university's International and Area Studies division, is also supported by the University of California Press and by the university's California Digital Library. The program will select, edit, and publish articles on international topics. The California Digital Library will provide servers to put the material online. The articles need only be connected, however tenuously, to a professor or an event at an institution in the University of California system. For example, the digital collection will soon feature a series of essays about women and Islam after a scholar from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev organized a conference on the topic at Berkeley. David K. Leonard, dean of International and Area Studies, says that the online program will focus on work that would be difficult to publish through traditional venues. One examples of an esoteric publication that will soon appear online is a book of Bulgarian dialectology. "These are such obscure things that you think it's a miracle that you're able to publish them at all," he says. Another forthcoming publication will be a catalog of pictures of letter seals from an ancient Persian dynasty. Publishing this in print would cost too much, Mr. Leonard says. "What would have been impossible in a print run is now quite possible digitally." Mr. Leonard says he hasn't calculated the total cost of the program. He pays editors a total of about $70,000 a year to work on the digital collection. The program also means to provide scholarly materials to academics in other countries -- a main reason the site will be free to users. "That gives access to people around the world who could never afford a publication from the United States," he says. Gerald C. Lubenow, managing editor of the digital collection, says that scholars on the University of California Press's editorial board will make selections for the site and will oversee the peer-review process. Editing and communications among the supervising scholars, editors, reviewing scholars, and authors will all rely on e-mail, which he hopes will make the publishing process much faster than it would be in traditional settings. It's not clear if the university's Academic Senate will recognize work in the digital collection for promotions in salary or tenure. When Mr. Leonard questioned representatives of the senate on the issue, "they waffled," he says. Mr. Leonard says he wants to make sure that the program's peer-review process is as stringent as any in traditional publishing, which he eyes as a rival. "We believe that once we have established a reputation, we will make this competitive with print journals." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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