Locally Controlled Scholarly Publishing via the Internet: The Guild Model

Many librarians and scholars believe that the Internet can be used to dramatically improve scholarly communication via research articles. During the last decade there has been substantial discussion of four major publishing models where readers could access articles without a fee: electronic journals, hybrid paper-electronic journals, authors' self-posting on web sites, and disciplinary repositories where authors post their own unrefereed articles. There have been numerous practical projects within each of these models, as well as extensive discussions about their strengths and limitations. While some of these projects have become important scholarly resources in specific disciplines; none of them has become commonplace across numerous disciplines. There is a fifth model that has been quietly adopted and developed in a number of disciplines -the research publication series that are called working papers or technical reports that are sponsored by academic departments or research institutes. Many of these manuscript series are now made available to readers, online, and free of charge. This model -which we call Guild Publishing -has a distinct set of advantages and limitations when compared with the other four publishing models. This article explains the Guild Publishing Model, provides some examples, and discusses its strengths and limitations. Introduction The Internet is widely viewed as a potential facilitator of scholarly communication -including communication via research articles. There is considerable debate about which publishing models should organize these communications. Some often proposed candidates include: field-wide e-print repositories (Harnad, 1999), peer reviewed pure-electronic journals (Walker, 2000), hybrid paper-electronic journals (this model is usually an electronic version of the paper journal), and author self-posting (i.e. authors posting their articles on their own web sites) (Okerson & O’Donnell, 1995). Several of these models, such as author self-posting and e-print repositories (for example arXiv.org), have no direct paper precursors. There are now important examples of each of these practices in place. However, only one of these four major architectures has become dominant across variety of scholarly fields -the hybrid paper-electronic journal, which is a conservative extension of the traditional paper journal (Kling & McKim, 2000).