0.4 Benefits of online dissemination

Mission alignment

The first question confronting scholarly societies considering online distribution is why they should publish online. It makes sense, therefore, to review some of the principal benefits of publishing online—for authors, readers, and the society itself.

Most societies operate under charters directing them to promote research and the advancement of their field, and a society’s publication often represents the most visible manifestation of its mission. Online dissemination further supports the mission by increasing the access, reach, and visibility of a society’s journal.

Further, online publication provides a logical component of a more ambitious and progressive online presence for a society, including sponsoring an online community that maintains the society’s relevance by engaging its membership more actively. For example, the SAH’s online digital image archive not only provides images but has also helped to foster a new sense of community within the society. Although societies have historically been at the center of scholarly communities, they risk being marginalized as their members embrace the emerging scholarly communications mechanisms enabled by ubiquitous networking and digital publishing technologies. Societies should recognize online social networks as a cost-effective means of communicating with their members and increasing their visibility.

Although few small- and medium-size publishers have implemented social networking features—including blogs, online forums, podcasts, and wikis—a recent survey indicates that approximately 15-25 percent of these publishers intend to deploy such functionality in the future. Cox and Cox (2008), 89 and 91. Although online social networking media are in the early stages of development, societies should experiment with such media and allow their applications to evolve along with the tools themselves. In this way, a society can exploit the capabilities of digital networking to maintain its relevance within its specific field and as part of the global scholarly community. An online publishing program, in this context, will represent an integral component of a society’s broader digital communication and membership strategies.

Author and reader benefits

Author benefits

An online edition of a journal provides several benefits to authors, including:

• Access to digital functionality in presenting their research, including images, video, audio, and other media not easily included in print publications;
• Greater reach and access to readers in their field; and
• Greater impact for their research.

Digital functionality

Publishing online provides authors access to digital functionality—including support for large supplemental data sets; multimedia features, including audio and video, animation, and three-dimensional modeling; deep searching and linking through semantic tagging; low-cost color; indexing and searching for charts, illustrations, images, tables, and graphics; the ability to manipulate supporting data sets; and social networking capabilities (e.g., online collaborative authoring, wikis, collaborative taxonomies), tools for communication between readers, support for RSS feeds, and other features not possible in print.