Scholars Press and the Emory University Libraries are involved in a three-year cooperative venture known as the SELA Journals Project. The project involves taking four of the print journals published by Scholars Press--the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Semeia, Biblical Archaeologist, and Critical Review of Books in Religion--and preparing them for electronic distribution via the Internet and CD-ROM. The project will begin with the 1996 issues of each of the journals. In addition, all of the back issues of Semeia will be made available in electronic format.
The journals were chosen because they contain a variety of approaches, formats, and content. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, a quarterly published by the American Academy of Religion, is a good example of a typical humanities- related scholarly journal. Each issue contains six to eight articles on a variety of topics, along with about 25 book reviews. The articles are generally anywhere from 15 to 30 pages in length and consist primarily of text, with few graphs, charts, or photographs.
Semeia, a journal sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature, is described by its subtitle as "An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism." Each of its four annual issues is focused on a single topic, and responses to other articles in the same issue are often included. The electronic version of Semeia will include pre-prints, or draft versions of articles, in order to give people an opportunity to respond online. The author of the pre-print will then have the opportunity to react to these responses in subsequent drafts and, ultimately, in the final form of the article.
The American Schools of Oriental Research is participating in the SELA Journals Project by including Biblical Archaeologist. Unlike the previous two journals, Biblical Archaeologist resembles a trade magazine. In print, its 8-1/2 x 11 inch glossy pages contain many line drawings, maps, charts, and photographs integrated into each article. The magazine is produced with a four-color cover and with black plus an additional color throughout. Each issue also includes a regular column, a letter from the editor, book reviews as well as miscellaneous archaeological news items gathered into a specially demarcated section. Biblical Archaeologist appears four time a year.
The final journal in the SELA Journals Project, Critical Review of Books in Religion, contains both a large number of regular length book reviews and a few longer review articles. The review articles analyze creative new scholarship in a particular field, focusing on one book or a cluster of books on the same topic. Surveying books that cover the gamut of religion and religious studies, this journal appears once a year. In addition to the reviews that will appear on its own home page, reviews of books in the field of biblical studies that will ultimately appear in Critical Review can be previewed, along with reviews for the Journal of Biblical Literature, on another Web page related to the SELA project, the JBL/CRBR Online Reviews page.
Many reviews of books in the biblical field of study are received by the Journal of Biblical Literature office, too many, in fact, to be included in JBL. The reviews that will not appear in JBL are assigned to the print edition of Critical Review. As the JBL office receives reviews, it will make them available as quickly as possible on the JBL/CRBR Online Reviews page. Later, when they are assigned to one or the other print journal, the online version will be updated to reflect this fact, and the review itself will be moved either to a JBL archives directory or to the Critical Review home page. Some reviews are already online and may be viewed at http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/jbl-crbr/reviews.html.
Unlike some online publishing efforts, all of the articles that appear in the journals associated with the SELA project are in their final form; they are not preprints (with the exception, of course, of the draft versions of Semeia articles that will precede the final form). In fact, the content of the online articles will be identical with that of the print articles. Even typographical errors will not be changed after the article is posted. Thus, scholars can feel safe in citing the electronic version of an article, since they know that the text will not change.
One of the means of electronic delivery of the journals that will be used in the project is CD-ROM. Although they will be made available to individuals as well, it is envisioned that libraries and academic departments will be the primary users of the SELA Journals Project CD-ROMs. The first CD-ROMs will contain a year's worth of articles in a particular journal, but subsequent issues of a journal will most likely be bound together on a single CD-ROM. The entire backlist of Semeia, for example, will probably fit on a single CD-ROM. Libraries will gain at least three advantages from the CD-ROMs. First, if the CD-ROM is made available on a local network, multiple users will be able to access the volumes at the same time. Second, the amount of space needed for archiving CD-ROMs is much less than that needed for print volumes. Although libraries will undoubtedly continue to keep bound copies of print journals for the foreseeable future, a transition to a digital storage technology like that of the CD-ROM (also magnetic and optical drives and tapes), as opposed to the analog form of microfilm and microfiche, with their concomitant difficulties for viewing, will undoubtedly begin to take place in the next few years. In addition to the advantages already mentioned, a third important attribute of CD-ROMs, in comparison with print and other analog formats, is the ability they give the user to do both simple and complex searches.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the project for the majority of scholars is the fact that they will have access to the journals via the Internet. The primary form of distribution will be via TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web site (http://scholar.cc.emory.edu ). Every journal will have its own home page, each with a different look. The mixture of pre-print and final publication articles on the Semeia page has already been mentioned. Sample pages from back issues of Biblical Archaeologist are already available from the ASOR home page, although the SELA Biblical Archaeologist pages are likely to have a somewhat different look. Some reviews that will ultimately appear in Critical Review of Books in Religion (and the Journal of Biblical Literature) are also already online (see above). Those interested in following the progress of the online journals can periodically check out their home pages on TELA (all these paths are preceded by the URL for TELA [see above]): /scripts/JAAR/JAAR.html, /scripts/Semeia/Semeia.html , /scripts/BA/BA.html, and /scripts/CRBR/CRBR.html. General information about the SELA project will be at /scripts/SELA/SELA.html.
The electronic versions of the journal articles will be identical with the print versions, although they will often appear online some time before they appear in print. Thus, page numbers, and even the issue of the journal in which a particular article will appear, will not be known when they are first posted to the Web. However, alternative methods of citing the electronic versions (by paragraph number and by electronic issue number, for example) will be available. Thus, the articles that appear online will be immediately usable in the same ways that print articles are. Currently, the World Wide Web does not support non-Roman characters (but things are changing--see this issue of Offline!), so transliteration will be used in the HTML (Web) version of the articles. In addition to HTML, articles will be available in SGML (TEI), ASCII, and perhaps other forms as well. Articles will be accessible from the Scholars Press FTP site (ftp://scholar.cc.emory.edu), and e-mail distribution lists will be set up as well.
The idea for the project arose out of conversations between Harry Gilmer, Director of Scholars Press, and Joan Gotwals, Vice- Provost for Libraries, Emory University, concerning Emory's ongoing Digital Libraries Project and Scholars Press's forays into the field of electronic publishing. As the project began to take sharper focus, others became involved in the project, including Betsey Patterson and Pat Graham from the Emory University Libraries and Dennis Ford and Jimmy Adair from Scholars Press. Pat Battin, a consultant with Emory for their Digital Libraries Project and also a consultant with the Commission on Preservation & Access, was also intimately involved in the development of the project.
The SELA working group met several times to discuss and design the project, and a consensus arose that a special conference with experts in the areas of electronic humanities publications and digital archiving for libraries was needed. This meeting was held in Atlanta on February 13-14, 1995. In addition to the members of the SELA working group, the following people participated in the conference: Jerry Campbell (William R. Perkins Library, Duke University), Jim Johnson (Information Technology Division, Emory University), Paula T. Kaufman (John C. Hodges Library, University of Tennessee), Robert A. Kraft (Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania), Ann Okerson (Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing, Association of Research Libraries), James J. O'Donnell (Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania), David Petersen (SBL Research and Publications Committee, Iliff School of Theology), Charles Prebish (Department of Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University), R. Thomas Schaub (American Schools of Oriental Research), and Gene Tucker (Candler School of Theology, Emory University).
Conference participants discussed the electronic publishing model, intellectual property and access issues, economic issues for publishers, and archival storage. The four journals that had been proposed by the working group were approved by the participants, and questions regarding the specifics of electronic and online publishing were addressed in some detail. The consensus of those attending the meeting was that the proposed project would be useful in exploring uncharted areas in electronic publishing, in evaluating the usefulness of electronic and online access to scholarly publications, and in determining the utility of electronic media for the purposes of searching and archiving material in a library setting.
As a result of the conference, the working group was able to draw up a grant proposal for the project, which they submitted to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. On July 10, 1995, Scholars Press and the Emory University Libraries announced that they had received a $250,000 three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, and the project was underway. The project will cover all of the 1996, 1997, and 1998 issues of the journals. Scholars who use the electronic versions of the journals are invited to send their evaluations, comments, and suggestions to Jimmy Adair (jadair@emory.edu).