eScholars of the World, Unite!

摘要

The dawn of the printing press in 1452 ushered in an era of transposing movable type to paper that continues to this day. The emergence of desktop publishing in the mid 1980s as a viable alternative to traditional printing techniques may have diminished demand for those methods, but it hardly hindered the cachet associated with being published. If anything, the more immediate accessibility of publishing tools fed a desire among all writers to make their ideas available to the masses. By the early 1990s, however, anyone with something to say could conceivably share it with the world via the Internet, which ultimately gave countless writers-in-search-of-publishers a forum in which to share their work with others. Known as "self-publishing," the process has turned the traditional publishing paradigm on its ear. While much of the content published on the Internet is far from valuable (or only valuable to a very few), a growing number of Web sites are purveying content that, in business applications, is considered mission critical and, in academic contexts, furthers understanding of the discipline for which it was generated. Unlike traditional book and academic publishers, who reject millions of manuscripts each year, online publishers are more inclined to publish content―at considerably less cost and with far fewer strings attached. Indeed, writers of all kinds of content are now finding an audience online who may never have seen their work otherwise.