Enhancing Scholarly Publications: Developing Hybrid Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Enhancing publications has a long history but is gaining acceleration as authors and publishers explore electronic tablets as devices for dissemination and presentation. Enhancement of scholarly publications, in contrast, more often takes place in a Web environment and is coupled with presentation of supplementary materials related to research. The approach to enhancing scholarly publications presented in this article goes a step further and involves the interlinking of the 'objects' of a document: datasets, supplementary materials, secondary analyses, and post-publication interventions. This approach connects the user-centricity of Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web. It aims at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. We explored this conception of enhancement on a small set of books prepared for traditional academic publishers. While the project was primarily an exercise in development, the conclusion section of the article reflects on areas where conceptual and empirical studies could be initiated to complement this new direction in scholarly publishing.


Introduction
Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly considering possibilities for making research available on the Web. Instruments for data collection and analysis, datasets and metadata describing this material, conference papers and project reports are appearing (and in some cases are required to be placed) in Web-based repositories. 1 One area receiving less attention in this trend, however, is development of Web venues that integrate the traditionally published book with the diverse materials related to an overall research project. "Enhanced publication" is a term reflecting such integration, and a range of initiatives have been supported by the SURFfoundation in the Netherlands to develop such forms of publication (see SURF Web site for details: http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/themas/openonderzoek/verrijktepublicaties/Pages/defaul t.aspx).
One of the six projects included in the most recent wave of SURF projects was called "Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences". Initiated in January 2011, Enhancing Scholarly Publishing was designed to prepare Web sites for four traditionally-published scholarly books and, in the process, to utilize a model of and tools for enhanced publications developed by SURF. The project concluded in June 2011 and this article elaborates on the main intentions and accomplishments during that period. By way of conclusion, we reflect on some of the challenges encountered, and sketch paths meriting further exploration.
This article begins with a backdrop of more general initiatives at enhancing print publications and proposes a definition of the term relevant to this project. That panorama and definition are followed by presentation of the objectives of the Enhancing Scholarly Publishing project and the conceptual principles underlying the database architecture for the book Web sites. Three of the four Web sites are presented in the next section (the fourth book that was part of the project Enhancing Scholarly Publishing is still in preparation and insufficiently developed for inclusion in this article). Finally, in the conclusion section we reflect on the overall project and note areas where further research and development should be undertaken.

Enhancing publications
Enhancement of print publications has been an ongoing endeavor, at least since Gutenberg if not earlier. Manuscripts artistically and elaborately illustrated by monks in monasteries during the Middle Ages suggest such long-term interest. More contemporary practices of including visualizations in books -tables, figures, photographic plates -are extensions of such enhancement. In the current Digital Age many publishers are exploring ways to integrate printed text with dynamic visualizations and supplementary digital materials available on the Internet. The Web site announced in July 2011 as supplement for the Harry Potter series, Pottermore (http://www.pottermore.com/), is such an extension. More elaborate, however, is the specially designed app for the iPad version of Al Gore's Our Choice (Gore, 2009), released by Push Pop Press in 2011. The Web site accompanying the book (http://ourchoicethebook.com/site_media/index2.html) reflects many of the features found on Web sites complementing published books: illustrations, sample texts, order information, references. The iPad and iPhone app, however, includes the full text, hyperlinks to external references, supplementary materials related to chapter topics, and even an iPad gimmick that shows a solar windmill turning when the reader blows air toward the blades of the windmill; sample pages of the app are available on the Web site of the initiative: http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/. 2 More scholarly presentations are being developed for the iPad platform, including a version of The Iliad containing both the original Greek and English translations, 3 Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road including a wide range of supplementary materials 4 (e.g., maps of the journey, audio files, original manuscript), and T. S. Elliot's seminal poem The Waste Land, showing some pages of the original manuscript, audio readings synchronized to the text, annotations explaining passages and interpretations by Elliot scholars on the poem. 5 Popular science publications, perhaps less scholarly in objective but nevertheless engagingly interactive, include a range of entries prepared by Touch Press in association with Farber and Farber. Solar System for iPad (Chown, 2011) is the widely acknowledged "crown jewel" in the growing series of titles being prepared by these two collaborating publishers. 6 A more scholarly initiative at enhancement is the decade-long research enterprise initiated at MIT and involving compilation of images and texts related to historical studies of Japan and China, all available in a Web environment, for the project entitled Visualizing Culture -Image-Driven Scholarship. 7 Designed for both research and educational objectives, the images are housed in a database and more than a hundred videos are included on the site; for details, see http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the home page of this resource and publication.

Figure 1: Screenshot from Visualizing Cultures
Source: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html One of the most far-reaching scholarly publications integrating scholarly data with the publication is the Mark Twain Project (http://www.marktwainproject.org/). As expressed in its mission statement, the "ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote." The project reflects long-term collaboration between the University of California Bancroft Library and the University of California Press, resulting in both traditionally printed volumes as well as Web access to digital versions of the volumes and the original sources on which the publications are based.
In comparison to the pioneering/forerunning/exceptional above-mentioned projects, initiatives from most academic book publishers fall short when it comes to enhancement. The situation is different in the area of journal publications. Here, traditional academic publishers are rapidly providing a host of features for the traditionally staid and textdominated journal article. Elsevier, through its subsidiary Cell Press, prepared a far-reaching initiative called the "Article of the Future," launched in July 2009. 8 A year later it had been implemented in the score of Cell Press journal titles. Figure 2 suggests several of the features available for articles in the journal Cell: pop-up illustrations and in-text references, navigation bar to sections of article, dynamic updating of reference citations. Many of the Web features found on the Cell Press journal articles are also suitable for inclusion in Web sites accompanying traditionally published book monographs. However, few of these features are commonly found on the Web sites prepared to accompany printed scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. In that regard, the intention of the SURF project Enhancing Scholarly Publishing to develop some of these features represents a step forward in preparation of enhanced publications within the humanities and social sciences.
An increasing body of literature is appearing that elaborates the idea of an "enhanced publication" (e.g., Boulal et al., 2010;Hoogerwerf et al. 2009). One of the more extensive reviews of this literature (Woutersen-Windhouwer & Brandsma, 2009) proposes the following definition: [An enhanced publication is] a publication that is enhanced with research data, extra materials, post publication data, database records (e.g. the Protein Data Bank), and that has an object-based structure with explicit links between the objects. In this definition an object can be (part of) an article, a data set, an image, a movie, a comment, a module or a link to information in a database. (Woutersen-Windhouwer & Brandsma, 2009, p. 20) Since formulation of this definition, debate around what constitutes an enhanced publication continues. Most recently, Breure, Voorbij and Hoogerwerf (2011) proposed a new term, "Rich Internet Publication," which they suggest can be seen as a scale reflecting degrees of involving integration, visualization and exploration.
Aware of the need for further exploration of types of enhancement suitable for scholarly publications, SURF issued a round of funding for pilot projects in 2010. In the call for proposals, to which the Enhancing Scholarly Publications project was submitted, the term "enhanced publication" is described as follows: An Enhanced Publication consists of a publication, usually in the form of text, enhanced with extra material. A publication can be an article in a journal, a dissertation, report, memo, or a chapter in a book. The condition is that it related to (scientific) research and includes an interpretation or analysis of the primary data or derivative thereof. The supplementary material can, for example, consist of research data, illustrative images, meta datasets and post-publication data such as comments and ranking data. Given the changes in post-publication data is it possible that an Enhanced Publication continues to develop across time. (Author translation of text, "Wat is een Verrijkte Publicatie?" SURF, 2010) Enhancement of publications involves a range of concrete tasks, and Woutersen-Windhouwer and Brandsma (2009, pp. 54-55) propose a checklist for preparation of the objects included in an enhanced publication:  Providing persistent identifiers that are unique and global;  Ascertaining timestamp and citation information;  Using of file types commonly available;  Ensuring that datasets have universal numeric identification;  Achieving adequate technical quality to merit preservation;  Considering legal issues related to incorporation of materials. They also suggest various forms of additional information related to objects in enhanced publications: availability and sustainability; ownership and responsibility; and indication whether an object has been peer reviewed, ranked, cited, and commented upon. The linking of objects within an enhanced publication merits consideration in a meaningful manner, they suggest, balancing complexity with utility. Moreover, the relation between linked objects (e.g., a chapter being part of a book) should be made clear. The above definition stresses permanence, persistence and authenticity -an approach understandable from the perspective of the institutions involved in formulating the text: repositories for scientific publications and research libraries. 9 But persistence and permanence are only two aspects of an enhanced publication; linking information in an interoperable and machine readable manner is another facet. Various standards, protocols, and tools have been developed to facilitate preparation of enhanced publications. Perhaps the most important is the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), which "develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content" (Woutersen-Windhouwer & Brandsma, 2009, p. 51). Figure 3 below depicts the relation between the content objects of OAI-ORE.
Without elaborating here on specific relations, the figure strives to suggest that there is extensive interlinking -interoperability -between the components. Project objectives, platform design, Web site features The above backdrop contributed to formulation of two central objectives for the SURF project Enhancing Scholarly Publishing: (1) to develop hybrid forms of publications, and (2) to develop a database allowing for aggregation of content attributes and associations across the individual book Web sites (Jankowski, 2011). Regarding the first objective, a template constructed within the WordPress platform was to be used to construct Web sites to complement the four selected books. These Web sites were to contain a broad range of features:  Supplementary resources (e.g., links, blogs, chapter appendices, author profiles);  Chapter visualizations (e.g., animations, figures, tables) in color;  Hyperlinks, both internal and external to the book texts;  Author updating of site materials;  Search features.
Regarding the second objective, a database was to be developed that would allow for aggregation of content attributes and associations across the individual book Web sites, such that topical relationships, intellectual underpinnings, and contextual factors could be made explicit. Fundamental to this approach is a focus on Web-based texts as dynamic and evolving discourses rather than completed works ready to be archived.
Four books were selected for inclusion in the project: three edited anthologies and a singleauthor university-level textbook: As reflected in Figure 4, a conceptual diagram of the project, the content of each book Web site is managed with a local database, connected to a central database. In this way, the linkage is established for aggregation and each book Web site retains an individual Web presence with local content management and storage. In addition to the five Web sites (four book Web sites and the central project Web site), a central accomplishment for the project is the launch of Semantic WordPress for Digital Scholarship, termed Semantic WORDS, 10 which is comprised of two specially tailored open source plugins designed to introduce traditionally published books to Web-based scholarly communication.
Each of the four book Web sites contains a broad range of features intended to enhance the printed versions of these books, including supplementary resources, visualizations, intertextual linking of content, and formal structuring of content using Semantic Web ontologies. In a subsequent phase, a central database will be established to facilitate aggregation of content across the individual book Web sites, such that object relationships, discursive threads, and contextual factors can be traced across the collection.

Figure 4: Schematic diagram of project Enhancing Scholarly Publishing
The following Web sites have been developed as part of this project: In this project we employed the WordPress (http://wordpress.org/) Content Management System (CMS) as the foundation for the Web sites, both for its relative ubiquity, ease of use, and, as mentioned above, with user communities in SSH in mind. An additional motivation was the wide-spread use of this platform. According to the recent World Wide Web Technology Survey, (http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all), the WordPress platform is used by 14% of the largest one million Web sites on the Internet, which amounts to more than half of the Web sites using a content management system.
The development strategy for this project focused in the first place on academic practice: how academics in the social sciences and humanities conduct scholarship. This priority informed development-specific functionality and interfaces. To this end, the relative ease of using WordPress played an important role. Figure   Enhanced Bibliplug The first of the Semantic WORDS plugins, Enhanced Bibliplug, ( http://epbooks.ehumanities.nl/semantic-words/enhanced-bibliplug), provides a suite of features for authors, which are focused on organization and publication of academic content on the Web. Features include custom page templates for academic texts, integration with Zotero for citation management, and expanded author profile pages for CV content management, such as publications, presentations, projects and other related career accomplishments. In addition to providing authors with advanced tools for publishing on the Web, Bibliplug facilitates visibility (e.g., in search engines) of relationships between and among researchers, institutions, and both formal and informal scholarly communication.
Bibliplug was first developed for the Virtual Knowledge Studio in 2009, and is still in use on some dozen project-related Web sites. At the time of development, the goal was to create a central repository for all researchers affiliated with the Studio to organize their academic work. The initial design included: (a) database schema for storing bibliographical references, (b) administration pages to manage the references, and (c) short code for easy retrieval of references based on author, year, and publication type.
In this project we further developed the plugin and re-released it as Enhanced Bibliplug. Added functionality includes: (a) the ability to connect and synchronize with Zotero accounts (see Figure 6), (b) a custom Author page template to display user's academic title and affiliation, bio, and CV content such as publications and presentations, (c) the ability to export bibliography data in RDF format based on the SPAR ontologies, and (d) the ability to group references based on categories and tags.
Enhanced publication for WordPress The second plugin, Enhanced Publication for WordPress (http://epbooks.ehumanities.nl/semantic-words/enhanced-publication-plugin-for-wordpress), works in parallel with Bibliplug. Added content is simultaneously structured in Semantic Web formats based on academic publishing ontologies. Unlike many Semantic Web applications, this plugin includes integration of a visualization feature, such that object relationships can be browsed with the InContext application developed by the SURFfoundation. The central function of this plugin is to describe a WordPress site as an OAI-ORE aggregated book (an enhanced publication). In this structure, we convert WordPress pages into book chapters and use various other plugins to facilitate and describe reference lists, authors and editors, and attachments. For visualizing the content object relationships, we employ SURF's InContext Visualiser; (http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/projecten/Pages/EscapeVisualisationcomponent.aspx) see Figure 7.
This combination of Web site and book objects was not readily compatible with any single ontology. We therefore selected a list of related ontologies to describe the full content of the aggregation. Following is a list of ontologies used in creating a new ontology that satisfied this need: In addition to customized plugins, several plugins are use from among the wide range of open source plugins developed by the WordPress community. Eleven of these are depicted in the diagram shown in Figure 8. We use an additional three plugins to augment functionality in our custom plugins: Co-Authors Plus, (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors-plus/), Ninja Page Categories and Tags, (http://wpninjas.net/plugins/ninja-page-categories-and-tags/) and User Avatar (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-avatar/) 12

Implementing enhancement
This section outlines the steps undertaken in developing the Web presence for the three traditionally published books noted above using the Semantic WORDS framework. Inasmuch as there are specific details and features related to each, they are presented in separately.
All of the book-related Web sites, however, are based on a uniform template constructed within the WordPress content management system described in the previous section. The publisher granted permission to place the text of the book on the Web site, and this allowed us to illustrate how the chapters will be presented in both pdf and html file formats. At this time, two chapters have been prepared in this fashion. Figure 9 shows the Web site page with links to presentations given by authors; Figure 10 illustrates information on related books and links to sites associated with these publications. Figure 11 depicts author information from the database created for the book.
Although preparation of the Web site complementing this book is well underway, the text for all 17 chapters has not yet been uploaded to the site. Once completed, these chapter presentations will also include the following functionalities:  Search function through chapter texts;  Hyperlinks embedded in chapters;  Pop-up figures and tables in chapters. From its conception, VKS intended to initiate and conduct new research practices, and to engage with on-going innovative practices of other researchers. In this regard, VKS researchers were both "makers" and "observers" of new digital scholarship. Two notions central to Science and Technology Studies (STS), which constituted the home discipline of many of the central members of the VKS, are practice and community. These notions are reflected in the preparation of Virtual knowledge and in the complementing Web site. Regarding the book, three workshops were conducted during preparation of chapters; regarding the Web site, one workshop was held related to preparing and uploading contact for the site.
Based on interactions during preparation of the book, it was decided to prepare a Web complement to the print volume. Several considerations contributed to adoption of this idea:  To continue interactions among authors;  To support the formation of a community around ideas expressed in the book;  To embed the book in an emerging environment of similar books;  To disseminate and promote of the book.
To support preparation of an enhanced publication for the book and to explore how preparation of such a Web complement might facilitate the previously mentioned community function, a workshop was organized in April 2011 for book contributors. Of the 17 contributors, seven attended the workshop. The event provided opportunity for participants to become familiar with the Web site and the general procedures for uploading information, including bibliographic entries that were submitted with a specially prepared plugin for the WordPress site. The workshop concluded with a general discussion, during which some persons expressed regret at not being involved in an earlier stage in order to contribute to the design process and the user interface with the site. This discussion was continued in a post-workshop survey that allowed all contributors to reflect on the Web site under construction.
The level of contribution during and after the workshop was modest. While content has been uploaded to the site, much remains to be completed. That acknowledged, preparation for the workshop did stimulate members of the project team to complete the Web site template and specially developed plugins for bibliographic entries. Some of the criticisms of the workshop and reservations about an enhanced publication included:  Inadequate involvement of the book editors in the planning;  Unclear value of a book Web site for authors;  Time constraints prevented engagement at the desired level;  Uncertainty about the utility of some site features, including author photos and videos;  Technical problems experienced with the site, including functioning of the interface;  Insufficient support from project team members in using the site. Some of the positive reactions to the workshop and EP Project included:  Appreciation for being able to link references;  Acknowledgment of potential value in creating cohesion of edited collections through an enhanced publication;  Value of Web site for author visibility;  Relevancy of site to own research practices.
Negotiations are ongoing with MIT Press, publisher of the book, for development of an enhanced version. Preliminary reactions reflect interest in publishing the volume and in combining the book with an enhanced publication in the form developed during this project. To this end, a preliminary Web site has been prepared and includes the basic functionalities included in the WordPress template; see Figure 12 for illustration of the page describing the book.
Many of the functionalities for the accompanying Web site will remain important and further work will be required to complete preparation of the content related to these features (e.g., providing supplementary resources such as links, uploading bibliographic entries, completing video films of authors reflecting on their chapters).
It is anticipated that a second workshop for authors may be necessary once arrangements have been made with the publisher regarding preparation of the book. This workshop will build on the experiences of the initial workshop held during this project. The third book that is part of this project on enhanced publishing was released by Peter Lang in May 2011 and is entitled The long history of new media: Technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness. As with the other books in the project, this is an edited volume and has been prepared and published in a manner reflective of conventional procedures for scholarly publishing. The book was released as a paperback and the cover consists of a designed arrangement of book title and names of editors. The text of the book is printed in black ink on white paper; there are few illustrations and no tables in the book.
The Web site constructed for The Long history of new media contains a similar set of features as prepared for the other two books and uses the same WordPress template for the site; see Figure 13 illustrating the homepage of the site and Figure 14 containing biographical sketches of contributing authors.
Inasmuch as the book has recently been released by the publisher Peter Lang and no prior arrangement was made for reproducing the full book manuscript, only introductory paragraphs from the chapters have been uploaded to the site, along with the text of the introduction chapter.
The Web site is under construction and the content will mirror that available on the site for the e-Research book, and include the following features:  Book-related materials: description of book,

Conclusion
This project involved development of hybrid Web venues for three traditionally published scholarly books. These Web venues extended beyond the increasingly common practice of preparing electronic brochure-style Web sites accompanying scholarly titles; the sites developed within this project incorporate features reflecting what has come to be termed enhanced publishing. While there is a broad range of interpretation as to what constitutes an enhanced publication, the features included in the Web sites of the Enhanced Scholarly Publication project reflect an interlinking of components of the publications in the manner possible utilizing Web 2.0 applications and practices, and content structures facilitated by Semantic Web formats. This involved construction of a database for each of the book titles, allowing for aggregation of content within and across the individual book Web sites.
The initial WordPress template for the book Web sites was redesigned to facilitate ease of use by book authors and ensure basic uniformity in the presentation of site content. Plugins for the site were designed, tested, and implemented; these plugins facilitate author bios and reference management with a variety of display options within each book chapter and for the book as a whole. Web sites were prepared for each of the four books using the common template, and illustrations of content for each of the books was uploaded to the respective sites. The amount of content uploaded varies per book because of the different phase of completion and "life cycle" of each book. For example, the book e-Research was released two years ago and the publisher agreed to allow the full text of the book to be placed on the Web site. A database has been constructed for each of the three book titles and these individual databases are integrated into an overall database.
Looking back on the project, the undertaking involved an accelerated learning experience in the terminology and models underlying the notion of enhanced publishing as formulated by the funding organization, the SURFfoundation. While the Web sites for the books are not equally developed and completed, each reflects a different phase of the book life cycle and all are based on preparation of an overarching database containing materials from those monographs.
In conclusion it should be stressed that the project Enhancing Scholarly Publications was practically oriented and exploratory; it did not have theoretical aspirations or intention to perform empirically grounded research. The exploration did reveal, however, much need to extend theoretical understanding of the transformations that scholarly publication are undergoing, and to develop an empirical research agenda related to those understandings. Although separate from this project, some of the team members have been undertaking theoretical and empirical research related to the concept of openness and scholarly communication, which could guide further practically-oriented projects at enhancing publications (Tatum & Jankowski, in press). The research agenda that might evolve from this exploration could include formative case studies of similar initiatives to enhance scholarship, thereby contributing to both theory construction and scholarly practice.