Part II: SSP - Our 30 Years in Context

By Barbara Meyers Ford, SSP Historian and President, Meyers Consulting Services

As promised in my article the last issue of SSP News, here I present some of the many significant events that helped to shape the industry and the Society for Scholarly Publishing after our founding in 1978.

1980: First working draft of SGML published

1981: IBM personal computer introduced

1983: Desktop workstations introduced; sixth draft of SGML widely promoted as a standard

1984: Macintosh personal computer introduced; birth of DTP software with Aldus PageMaker

1985: SilverPlatter unveils prototypes with its first information partners, American Psychological Association (PsycINFO) and Sociological Abstracts; Psycologuy, first online peer-reviewed journal in the social sciences, begins as the PsycNET Newsletter in April and in 1988 is renamed the BITNET Psychology Newsletter

1986: SGML adopted as an international standard (ISO 8879); The Academic American Encyclopedia is available on CD-ROM, the first reference work published in this medium

1989: First International Biomedical Peer Review Congress Held; fall of the Berlin Wall and the formal collapse of socialism

Early 1990s: Birth of the online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (AAAS & OCLC claim to be the first "roadkill" on the Information SuperHighway)

1990: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) first used; Hytelnet launched (first online hypertext Internet directory noted especially for links to network-accesible library catalogues); first online preprint Web site in the sciences, xxx.lanl.gov, created by Ginsbarg (becomes arXiv in 1991); first count of electronic journals by Association of Research Libraries (ARL)—total = 9; World Wide Web (WWW) created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland

1992: HTML 1.0 issued; Gopher launched; Mathematical Physics Preprint Archive established; Internet Software Consortium (ISC) counts ~100 Web sites

1993: Number of Web sites nearly doubles to just under 200; National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases alpha version of Mosaic; CERN announces free use of WWW technology, launches preprint server

1994: W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) established; National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Mosaic developed for WWW and global information infrastructure introduced by Al Gore; National Science Foundation launches Digital Libraries Initiative; HighWire Press launched by Stanford University Libraries; birth of Netscape and Amazon.com; National Academy of Sciences Press starts practice of free online full-text editions of all NASP books; Stevan Harnad proposes the concept of self-archiving

Mid-1990s: Scholarly publisher research projects TULIP, Red Sage, etc., undertaken

1995: JSTOR established to provide electronic access to journal backfiles; HighWire Press announces its first hosted publication; Amazon.com opens its virtual doors; ARL count of e-journals tops 300

1996: Development of XML begins; libraries mark end of the reign of paper; Journal of Clinical Investigation converted to open access; Version 1 of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.’s "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" appears; Microsoft joins the browser wars; eBay comes online

1997: PubMed initiated at NIH by Dr. Harold Varmus; Stevan Harnad launches CogPrints; first blog – Slashdot – launched (weB LOG, named by Jorn Barger)

1998: XML 1.0 published as an official W3C recommendation; ARL count of e-journals nears 2,500 (1,049 peer-reviewed); International Consortium for the Advancement of (electronic) Academic Publication (ICAAP) established; ARL launches Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

1999: Napster comes into existence; World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties approved by US; PubMed established; Open Archives Initiative (OAI) launched; Open Citation Project (OpCit) launched; BioMedCentral announces plan to offer free online access to all its journals

2000: CrossRef formed by PILA (Publishers International Linking Association, Inc.) and goes live as the first collaborative reference linking service; PubMed Central (with free full-text articles) launched to supplement PubMed; CalTech Library System launches Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA); Southampton University releases Eprints (OIA-compliant software for eprint archiving); launch of Gnutella, computer code enabling people to share files outside the formal Internet/WWW infrastructure

2001: Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) reports 100 million domains registered; letter to editor of Science launches Public Library of Science (PLoS); Forrester Research projects that online commerce will reach $6.8 trillion by 2004

2002: BioMed Central starts charging processing fees in January and in July launches Open Access Charter (open access for long-term regardless of ownership changes); Open Society Institute launches Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI); CERN releases CDSWare, OAI-compliant open-source software for document servers; MIT releases Dspace, OAI-compliant open-source software for archiving eprints and academic content; PloS receives $9 million grant from Moore Foundation; 619 million people worldwide access the Internet, according to GlobalReach statistics

2003: Budapest Open Access Initiative publishes two business guides for open access publishing; FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture) Version 1.0 released by University of Virginia and Cornell University; Lund University launches directory of open access journals with Open Society Institute and SPARC funding; Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing released; Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D-MN) introduces the Public Access to Science Act (HR 2613); PloS launches PloS Biology, its first open access journal; Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities released by Max Planck Society and European Cultural Heritage Online; UK House of Commons initiates an inquiry into prices and accessibility of scientific journals; declaration of principles endorsing open access approved by UN World Summit on the Information Society

2004: ISC reports 250 million domains registered; National Library of Canada starts Theses Canada, providing open access to doctoral dissertations; Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding issued by OECD Ministerial Representatives from 34 nations; Internet access grows to 729.2 million worldwide (source: Global Reach); 12,514 blogs registered at Globe of Blogs by May 30

2005-2008: Continued development of e-publishing formats such as CSS (introduced 1998), XSL(1999), XSLT (2004), XPath (2002), XSL-FO(2001), XML Schema, XPointer (2002), XHTML (2001), XLink (2004); technical advances in e-book reader technology; NIH mandates deposit of journal articles based on reports of federally funded research

Since the turn of the 21st century, processes, policies, and practices in scholarly publishing have progressed at a rate impossible to cite in just a few lines. Each year has brought increased capacities and capabilities, new social and technological approaches to information, and collaborative relationships among players across the whole wide world.

SSP was born and grew into an adult during a dynamic and often tumultuous era. In the years since our founding, SSP continued reporting on major advances in the field through its annual meetings, seminars, workshops, and occasional publications, all in the spirit of networking.

We have enjoyed 30 grand years of development and discussion—not just about how SSP should grow and thrive, but about how all of us, working to support the stream of information from author to reader, should maintain the vitality of what we call scholarly publishing.

Barbara Meyers Ford was one of SSP’s 16 founders and member of the Pro Tem Board of Directors. Barbara continued her active support of the Society throughout the decades and evolved her own career to match the developments in publishing. Her consultancy, Meyers Consulting Services, now celebrates 25 years of a strong commitment to working with professional societies, publishers, their suppliers, and others in the scholarly communications community in their achievement of excellence in operations and purpose.