Ten years of ElPub : an analysis of its major trends

Abstract

Electronic publishing constitutes one of the hottest topics discussed amongst researchers from a variety of disciplines since the seminal work by Harnad, in the 1980's, “The scholarly skywriting”, when its potentialities started to challenge the well-established business model of commercial publishers. It was certainly in this context that the first ElPub thinkers initiated the conference. In fact, the International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ElPub) is the realisation of an idea that was brought into reality in 1997 by a group of librarians, including the most persistent ElPubers Peter Linde and John Smith. In its very beginning, ElPub only comprised the presentation of papers. In 1999, there were two panel debates whose speakers were invited to participate and received grants from the conference for that. Over the subsequent years, ElPub has gradually incorporated features of greater, well-established international conferences. Especially since 2003, a variety of sessions started to be part of the conference programme, annually organised in two tracks, namely general and technical. Those sessions comprise: special sessions focusing on a specific topic and sponsored by a specific organisation, workshops - mostly on technical aspects of electronic publishing -, posters and demonstrations. A gradual increasing variety of topics has also been defined in the Call for Papers of the conference, as constituents of the topic. Since then, ElPub has covered a number of interesting topics, presented by people from ca. 44 countries so far.