Introduction

In June 1989, I launched PACS-L, a LISTSERV mailing list. PACS-L was one of the first library-oriented mailing lists, and, at the time, it was unusual in that it had a broad subject focus (public-access computer systems in libraries, such as online catalogs) rather than a narrow focus on a specific library automation system. Although PACS-L's greatest contribution may have been in raising librarians' awareness of the importance and potential of the then fledgling Internet, it was also the platform on which my initial scholarly digital publishing efforts were based.

In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.¹ This journal, if it was published today, would be called a "libre" open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Aside from Public-Access Computer Systems News (also "libre" open access), my subsequent digital publications, such as the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, were "gratis" open access until 2004, when all new versions of existing publications and new publications became "libre" open access under various versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.²

For current information about my publication activities, see "Brief Resume of Charles W. Bailey, Jr." and "Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr."

Chronology

Below is a chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 through June 2009.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers. The establishment of PACS-L facilitated the development of my scholarly digital publications.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review, also known as PACS-R), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement). (See the list of PACS Review editorial staff.)
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
• August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad's "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
• October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• 1992. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 1, 1990 was published as a paperback by the Library and Information Technology Association, with all profits assigned to LITA. Walt Crawford formatted a digital copy of the book as camera-ready copy for LITA at no cost (he did this for subsequent print versions as well).³
• 1992. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 2, 1991 was published as a paperback by the Library and Information Technology Association, with all profits assigned to LITA.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the University of Houston Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• 1993. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 3, 1992 was published as a paperback by the Library and Information Technology Association, with all profits assigned to LITA.
• 1994. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 4, 1993 was published as a paperback by the Library and Information Technology Association, with all profits assigned to LITA.
• January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document, then Wei Wu maintained it as a searchable Web site until 2006.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• 1995. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 5, 1994 was published as a paperback by the Library and Information Technology Association, with all profits assigned to LITA.
• 1995. Research and Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems: Report for the Fiscal Year 1994, a Grant-in-Aid Research by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Japan for the Year 1994/95 (06302076). Papers from The Public-Access Computer Systems Review were translated into Japanese and published as a paperback by the National Institute of Informatics.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions, with the last version being published on October 25, 1996. Starting with version 23 (June 25, 1996), the bibliography was searchable.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996.
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. The bibliography is searchable. See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• November 15, 1996. Published the first Word version of SEPB in version 2.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB in version 3.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• June 1, 1999. Published version 25 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• April 19, 2002. With Version 42 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Word version.
• August 29, 2003. Published version 50 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.⁴
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repositories, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• July 8, 2005. Published the first version of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• August 10, 2005. Made a preprint of the "Open Access Webliography" available (coauthored with Adrian K. Ho).
• September 29, 2005. Made a SEPB archive Zip file available that contains all versions of the bibliography. This file is updated with each new SEPB version.
• October 25, 2005. Published the first version of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• December 31, 2005. There were over 352,000 escholarlypub.com Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2005 by over 146,000 visitors from 163 countries.
• January 8, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• April 28, 2006. With Version 62 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Acrobat version.
• October 25-28, 2006. Created Google Custom Search Engines for the OAB, SEPB, and SEPW.
• November 1, 2006. Resigned my position as Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, where I had worked since November 1987 (previously as either Assistant Dean for Systems or Assistant Director for Systems).
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries' servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 2.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2006 by over 663,000 visitors from 195 countries.
• December 31, 2006.There were over 4.2 million Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files from January 1994 through December 2006 (use data after December 2006 is not available).
• January 8, 2007. Replaced the mirror Blogger SEPW Weblog with a new one on the digital-scholarship.org domain using WordPress and FeedBurner.
• February 11-12, 2007. Recoded the Digital Scholarship Web sites to give them a common look and feel. Published an HTML version of the "Open Access Webliography."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• September 25-27, 2007. Redesigned the entire Digital Scholarship site. Converted Version 69 of SEPB to the new design, and recoded all other site documents in XHTML and CSS to comply with the new design.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2007 by over 1.8 million visitors from 206 countries.
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 21, 2008. Became a member of the Open Access Directory Editorial Board. Helped build the initial Wiki, and continue to add content to it.
• April 29, 2008. Published the second annual PDF version of SEPB. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• May 12, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• June 9, 2008. Published version 72 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• June 14, 2008. Authorized using the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals as the basis for a new wiki bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access.
• October 27, 2008. Published Author's Rights, Tout de Suite.
• December 9, 2008. Published version 3 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• December 31, 2008. There were over 15.9 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2008 by over 3.4 million visitors from 214 countries.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 8.6 million Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web file requests from October 30, 1996 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 313,000 Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals Web file requests from March 3, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 71,000 "Open Access Webliography" Web file requests from August 10, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• January 20, 2009. Published version 3 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 5, 2009. Published Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition as a print-on-demand paperback book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (XHTML SEPB version that this paperback was based on was freely available.)
• May 12, 2009. Published version 75 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• June 5, 2009. There were over 20 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though June 5, 2009 by over 4 million visitors from 221 countries.
• June 29, 2009. Published version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• June 29, 2009. There were over 2,100 DigitalKoans posts in over 90 categories.

Articles about These Digital Publications

Altman, Ellen, and Allan Pratt. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 3, 1992, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (July 1994): 180-181.

Aycock, Mary. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Library Resources and Technical Services 52, no. 3 (2008): 212-213.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.

———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).

———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).

———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.

Cisler, Steve. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 71-72.

Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L's First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.

Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).

Gillespie, Thom. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. The Library Quarterly 64 (January 1994): 100-102.

Henner, Terry. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 4, 1993, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. Research Strategies 13 (Summer 1995): 188-189.

Jacsó, Péter. "Peter's Picks & Pans." Review of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76.

Jensen, Ann. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005).

Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.

Piper, Alison I. Review of LIBRES: Library and Information Science Electronic Journal and Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS-R). Library and Information Science Research 20, no. 1 (1998): 108-110.

Staff. "The Imagineer—Charles W. Bailey." Library Journal, 15 March 2003.

Tennant, Roy. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Current Cites 16, no. 3 (2005).

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.

Research Studies That Include the PACS Review

Butler, H. Julene. "Research into the Reward System of Scholarship; Where Does Scholarly Electronic Publishing Get You?" In Filling the Pipeline and Paying the Piper: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium, ed. Ann Okerson, 167-177. Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing, Association of Research Libraries, 1995.

———. "Where Does Scholarly Electronic Publishing Get You?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 26 (July 1995): 174-186.

Crawford, Walt. "Free Electronic Refereed Journals: Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm." Learned Publishing 15 (April 2002): 117-123.

Fosmire, Michael, and Elizabeth Young. "Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: What Access Do College and University Libraries Provide?" College & Research Libraries 61, no. 6 (2000): 500-508.

Harter, Stephen P. "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis." The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7, no. 5 (1996): 5-34.

———. "Scholarly Communication and Electronic Journals: An Impact Study." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49, no. 6 (1998): 507-516.

Harter, Stephen P., and Charlotte E. Ford. "Web-Based Analyses of E-Journal Impact: Approaches, Problems, and Issues." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (November 2000): 1159-1176.

Harter, Stephen P., and Hak Joon Kim. "Electronic Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Citation and Reference Study." Information Research, 2, no. 1 (1996).

Hawkins, Donald T. "Bibliometrics of Electronic Journals in Information Science." Information Research 7, no 1 (2001).

Jacsó, Péter. "Electronic Shoes for the Cobbler's Children: Treatment of Digital Journals in Library and Information Science Databases." Online 25 (July/August 2001): 46-52.

Joglekar, Neelambari, and Bharati Sen. "Evaluation of Electronic Journals in Library and Information Science." Information Studies 6 (July 2000): 189-200.

Roes, Hans. "Electronic Journals: A Survey of the Literature and the Net." Journal of Information Networking 2, no. 3 (1995): 169-186.

Smith, Alastair G. "Citations and Links as a Measure of Effectiveness of Online LIS Journals." IFLA Journal 31, no. 1 (2005): 76–84.

Stoller, Michael E. "Electronic Journals in the Humanities: A Survey and Critique." Library Trends 40, no. 4, (1992): 647-66.

Tonta, Yasar. "Scholarly Communication and the Use of Networked Information Sources." IFLA Journal 22, no. 3 (1996): 240-245.

Woodward, Hazel, Fytton Rowland, Cliff McKnight, Carolyn Pritchett, and Jack Meadows. "Café Jus: An Electronic Journals User Survey." Journal of Digital information 1, no. 3 (1998).

Zhang, Yin. "The Impact of Internet-based Electronic Resources on Formal Scholarly Communication in the Area of Library and Information Science: A Citation Analysis." Journal of Information Science 24, no. 4 (1998): 241-254.

———. "Scholarly Use of Internet-Based Electronic Resources." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (June 2001): 628-654.

———. "Scholarly Use of Internet-Based Electronic Resources: A Survey Report." Library Trends 47, no. 4 (1999): 746-770.

Notes

1. In 1989, the Internet was much more fragmented than it is today, and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and Usenet newsgroups. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," which tried to persuade CERN officials to support a global hypertext system (it was not called the World Wide Web until October 1990, when he coded the first server and browser). Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline and Internet History. Thanks to Robin N. Downes, then Director of the University of Houston Libraries, for his strong support for my digital publishing efforts from 1989-1996.

2. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

3. Printed annual versions of the The Public-Access Computer Systems Review were published at the recommendation of the journal's editorial board, which was concerned with the problem of limited Internet access by some readers during this early period.

4. Thanks to Peter Suber for his assistance with the Open Access Bibliography and his encouragement during its writing.