on the First Monday conference on openness in chicago.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0605180365may19,1,4571312.column?ctrack=1&cset=true
Net heads herald journal's 10th year
(published May 19, 2006, Chicago Tribune, Tempo section, p. 1)
Pop quiz.
First Monday is:
A. A monthly gathering of women who lunch, conducted at a rotating list of
restaurants in the vicinity of Oak Street.
B. When your Visa bill is due. Try not to forget this month.
C. The straight-to-DVD sequel to "Black Sunday."
D. One of the most widely read journals on and about the Internet.
E. Arguably Chicago's most influential magazine, now that Playboy has
essentially left for New York.
The answers, context makes it clear, are D and E.
If you're something of a Net head, or an academic whose work brings you in
contact with cutting-edge thinking on the Internet, you've probably heard
of First Monday.
If you were around the University of Illinois at Chicago campus this week
to witness the strikingly international gathering of nearly 200 people
from 30-plus countries marking
First Monday's 10th birthday with its second conference, you definitely
have heard of it.
But if the most techno-progressive your reading gets is picking up the
occasional copy of Wired at the doctor's office, you are forgiven for not
knowing not only that First Monday exists but also that it is published at
UIC. You won't find First Monday on a medical-office table, of course,
unless someone has printed out one of the articles and left it there.
Although the name derives from the publication schedule, there is no
publication in the 20th Century sense.
But this batch of HTML code tucked inside a World Wide Web domain --
marked by a logo that looks, one of its founders said, "like a ransom
note" -- is the opposite of ephemeral.
In keeping with its open-access founding principles, all of the almost 700
articles published in its first decade are readily accessible at
firstmonday.org, including the ones that have been turned into books ("The
Cathedral and the Bazaar," "The Social Life of Information," e.g.).
It tracks its readership, via computer addresses, to 184 countries, "and
the State Department recognizes 192, so we're just missing eight," says
co-founder and chief editor Edward Valauskas. And the readership it has
built, to the current 500,000 articles viewed a month, most of them from
archives, makes it a leader among peer-reviewed academic journals.
"I can't think of anything I've written anywhere that generated so much
response," says Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for
Networked Information, of his 2001 First Monday article on the future of
the book.
But First Monday is no forbidding fortress of technical jargon amid
thickets of footnotes. Because its aim is to be interdisciplinary, and
because the audience consists of so many non-native English speakers, the
articles are edited for wide accessibility.
"We aim to write simply and understandably," says Valauskas, a library
sciences professor at Dominican University in River Forest. Even the name
aims for user-friendliness. Although it resulted in his getting a lot of
"bad poetry submissions" at first, Valauskas says he's happy not to have a
title like, in his words, "The Journal of Boring Research Online."
It would be a misnomer. Among the "Best Mondays," a just-added Web site
feature collecting the journal's most popular articles, are Lynch's "The
Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World," an
explanation of the myths surrounding "Al Gore and the Creation of the
Internet" and, more prosaically, a study of online grocery shopping.
There's also, from five years ago, the counter-conventional Internet
wisdom argument that "Content Is Not King." Instead, says the piece,
connectivity rules, a point of view that Yahoo, for one, has just come
around to endorsing after threatening in recent years to start up its own
version of a mini, content-producing Hollywood studio.
"We've been an incubator for interesting ideas," Valauskas says.
The energetic 55-year-old native Chicagoan has a polymath background that
makes him an ideal candidate for editing a magazine that, like the medium
it covers, is interdisciplinary by definition.
On the First Monday site, Valauskas posts a picture of himself as a
teenager, among the paleontological collection at the Field Museum, where
he did a kind of internship. He graduated from UIC with an art history
degree and did graduate work at the University of Chicago in geophysical
sciences and library sciences. Currently, in addition to teaching at
Dominican, he is curator of rare books at the Chicago Botanic Garden and,
since 1993, has run a technology consulting firm, Internet Mechanics.
First Monday began when, 11 years ago, an editor at the Danish publishing
company Munksgaard asked Valauskas if he had any ideas for a new journal.
He did.
Internet visionary Esther Dyson, who came up with the First Monday title,
and Rishab Ghosh, an economist based in the Netherlands, joined Valauskas
as First Monday founders. After just under three years, Munksgaard sold
the journal back to its editors and publication began in the U.S., via the
UIC Library's computing systems.
Costs, thanks to the university's generosity, are zero (although MacArthur
Foundation helped fund the conference), and Valauskas' profits are also
zero. "We have no interest in making any money," he says. "For us the
value is the reputation."
And the proof that it can be done. The conference theme was openness, an
attempt to bridge gaps among various Web movements sharing the same
values: open science, open-source software, open access.
First Monday stands as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the open
model. "It's probably the most widely read open-access journal there is,"
says Ghosh, and one whose international stature might lead readers to
imagine it has a more imposing presence in its hometown: "Ed likes to joke
that fans around the world think there is this huge First Monday Tower in
Chicago."
Instead of a tower there is, Valauskas says, something more tangible, a
blueprint for Internet publishing that he hopes others will follow,
whether their topic be art or algae.
"Let a thousand First Mondays bloom," he says.
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