Effective Web Dissemination of Construction IT Research Publications

Abstract

Scientific publishing has undergone a number of paradigm shifts triggered by new technologies. The last technology leap, the world wide web, has made possible a new form of publishing called open access (OA), which places scholarly publications freely accessible for anyone on the web, using voluntary work and a variety of revenue models (other than subscription income) for sustaining the publishing activities. OA is eminently in line with the basic openness principles of science and the status of scientific results as a public good, and it is also cost effective for society as a whole. Despite its evident advantages OA publishing is still only in its infancy and has had a big impact in only a few scientific communities, such as high-energy physics. In civil engineering, and in construction information technology (IT) research, OA is still a relatively rare form of publishing. In the European Commission funded SciX project a generic system for scientific OA publishing was developed and was tested for running a number of services intended for the IT in architecture and civil engineering research communities. In addition the barriers for more widespread use of OA were studied. In this paper the different forms of open access: the peer-reviewed electronic journal, subject-specific, and institutional repositories, are first presented. After that the paper presents some of the results from the theoretical part of the project. Finally the paper briefly describes the architecture of the publishing platform and illustrates it with some of the pilots from the construction IT domain. It concludes with a discussion of the experiences obtained in setting up the pilots.

Full text

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Turk, Z., and B-C. Björk. "Effective web dissemination of construction IT research publications." Journal of
Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice 134, no. 2 (2008): 165-172.
Turk
1
, Z., Björk
2
, B.-C.,
Effective Web Dissemination of Construction IT Research
Publications
Abstract:
Scientific publishing has undergone a number of paradigm shifts triggered by new
technologies. The last technology leap, the world wide web, has made possible a new form of
publishing called open access (OA), which places scholarly publications freely accessible for
anyone on the web, using voluntary work and a variety of revenue models (other than
subscription income) for sustaining the publishing activities. OA is eminently in line with the
basic openness principles of science and the status of scientific results as a public good, and it
is also cost effective for society as a whole. Despite its evident advantages OA publishing is
still only in its infancy and has had a big impact in only a few scientific communities, such as
high-energy physics. In civil engineering, and in construction information technology (IT)
research, OA is still a relatively rare form or publishing.
In the European Commission funded SciX project a generic system for scientific OA
publishing was developed and was tested for running a number of services intended for the IT
in architecture and civil engineering research communities. In addition the barriers for more
widespread use of OA were studied. In this paper the different forms of open access: the
peer-reviewed electronic journal, subject-specific and institutional repositories, are first
presented. After that the paper presents some of the results from the theoretical part of the
1
Prof. dr., Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana, IKPIR-KGI, Jamova 2, Slovenia

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project. Finally the paper briefly describes the architecture of the publishing platform and
illustrates it with some of the pilots from the construction IT domain. It concludes with a
discussion of the experiences obtained in setting up the pilots.
Keywords: scientific publishing, open access, Internet, IT in construction
Subject headings: Indexing, Bibliographies, Information management, Information retrieval,
2
Prof.dr.,Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, PB 479, (Arkadiankatu 22), 00101
Helsinki, Finland

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INTRODUCTION
The effects of the Internet on scientific publishing
Scientific publishing fulfils a central function in the broader scientific knowledge sharing
process. Originally scientific journals appeared in the 17th century as mere surrogates for
attending the meetings of scientific societies. Those members who couldn't attend the
meetings still got a chance to follow the debates. In those early days there was no need for
peer review. The modern scientific journal developed only in the late 19th and the 20th
century as the number of scientific disciplines and scientists exploded (Guedon 2001).
The peer review system, which evolved to its present form in the latter half of the 20th
century, has helped scientists in identifying articles worthwhile reading from the ever-
increasing number of publications. An important function has also been to help
administrators in appointment and grant decision-making, since they don't need to familiarize
themselves with all the publications of applicants but can rely on the status of the journals in
which these have been published and their peer review process as a proxy for quality.
Major shifts in the methods of scientific publishing have followed advances in technology.
The latest shift is the Internet, which has affected the delivery mechanisms and business
models of this area tremendously. The web has made possible totally new models for
communication and publishing, which are not dependent on subscriptions or purchase, due to
the almost zero marginal cost of each extra download. In particular a new type of scientific
journal, the open access journal, has emerged. Most follow traditional and strict peer review
process, however, some OA journals have even tried out alternative forms of open peer
review where the manuscript is posted openly and depending on the feedback of readers can
be elevated to a fully published paper (ETAI 2005).

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In addition scientists have started uploading manuscripts as well as digital copies of work
they have published elsewhere, either in subject-specific or institutional repositories or on
their personal home pages.
Different scientific communities have seized on these new opportunities in varying ways,
depending on the communication traditions in the discipline and also on the emergence of
pioneers. High-energy physics has for instance been one of the leading disciplines in OA in
the setting up of the arXiV (arXiV 2005) repository of eprints, which today houses over
200.000 manuscripts and is the primary source of new research information for scientist in
that domain (Ginsparg 2000). Research communication in civil engineering and has been
only marginally affected, with a handful of open access journals founded in the late 1990’s.
Two of these are specifically concerned with the use of information technology in
architecture and civil engineering (IJDC 2005), (Itcon 2005).
It would seem natural that researchers who study how industry uses IT to enhance and
reengineer their processes seize the opportunities offered by the WWW for reengineering
their own knowledge management and communication processes. This has not, however been
the case on a larger scale in our research community, which up to date has proven rather
entrenched in old habits regarding publishing (Björk and Turk 2000).
The different channels of open access
Open access (OA) means that a reader of a scientific publication can read it over the Internet,
print it out and even further distribute it for non-commercial purposes without any payments
or restrictions. Thanks to the open availability the linking to OA publications via reference
lists is substantially facilitated, since the reader doesn't stumble into subscription barriers and
each reference is only a "mouse-click" away.

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The four most important OA channels are self-posting on the author's home pages, electronic
refereed scientific periodicals, research area specific e-print servers (in this paper called
subject-specific repositories), institutional repositories of individual universities and (Björk
2004). Already since the earliest days of the web individual researchers have put copies of
their own publications on their homepages. Although there are no published surveys of how
common self-posting is, it is the most common OA channel today.
OA scientific periodicals have been founded since the early 1990’s, usually as individual
efforts. As a rule such journals are electronic only, due to the need to minimize costs. OA
journals are usually funded largely by the voluntary work of the involved editors and direct or
implicit grants (the free usage of the hosting university’s web servers could be seen as a
subsidy). In more recent years a number of efforts to publish OA journals on larger scale
have emerged. Their business plan is usually to finance the operations through author
charges, typically in the range of 500 – 1500 US Dollars. Currently there are more than 2000
peer reviewed open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ
2005). These journals publish around 2-3% of all scientific journal articles appearing
annually.
Subject-specific and institutional e-print repositories typically target at parallel publishing of
material, which is being written for other outlets (such as conferences or traditional journals),
allowing earlier and more efficient dissemination. In some areas like computer science the
publishing speed can be a significant benefit. The guiding principle of such electronic
archives is, that researchers themselves upload article manuscripts, conference papers etc.
into the repositories. Thus very low maintenance costs can be achieved. The custodians of the
repositories usually only check, that totally irrelevant material is not deposited. Subject-
specific repositories contain an important part of research papers in some domains but are
totally missing in others.

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The increasing interest of the universities to start institutional repositories brings a systematic
and long-term commitment to this activity. Institutional Repositories represents a third
important OA-channel, and are relative newcomers compared to the journals and subject
specific repositories. Universities and their libraries are in a better position than individual
academics to guarantee that the material is available even after decades and that the collection
is systematically maintained, for instance to take account of changing file formats and media.
Although institutional repositories can be seen as useful marketing channels for individual
universities their most significant impact on the global scale can only be achieved via co-
operation via open access indexing services.
Today the primary channel for finding OA-material is through general-purpose web search
engines, unless the reader is a regular visitor to the journal or repository in question. Despite
their deficiencies general web search engines can be quite efficient, and a study from the
domain of computer science showed that publications, of which copies had been freely
available on the web, received on the average three times as many citations as others
(Lawrence 2001). The problem with using general search engines is, however, how to
distinguish the relevant publications from all the very varied material, which is available on
the Internet and tends to clutter the search results from queries. A recent interesting addition
to such search engines is Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), which not only allows
finding scientific papers on the web, but also other papers which reference these.
The SciX Project
The above introduction presents the baseline for a project funded by the European
Commission under the 5th Framework Programme - Open, self organizing repository for
scientific information exchange - SciX. The aim of the SciX project was to develop a pilot
system for establishing different sorts of open access repositories for scientific papers. Due to

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the background of the researchers the case field chosen for the pilot work was research
concerning the use of IT in architecture and civil engineering. In addition to the technical
work the project work also involved empirical studies of the scientific publishing process
(Björk and Hedlund 2004) and of the barriers to the proliferation of the Open Access
publishing.
SciX was a 28-month project with a EU funding of €1.000.000 that successfully finished in
May 2004. Co-ordinated by the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), the partners included the
Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration (Finland), the Icelandic Building
Research Institute, the eBusiness company Indra/Atlante (Spain), the Technical University of
Vienna (Austria), the FGG Institute (Slovenia) and the University of Salford (UK). The home
page of the SciX project is at http://www.scix.net/.
Paper outline
This paper started with a general introduction to Open Access publishing. After that the
empirical work done in the SciX project for studying the barriers for Open Access publishing
will be described. This empirical work helped in defining requirements for the technical work
done in the project to develop repository software, which is described in the subsequent
sections. Finally some experiences with setting up a number of pilot applications for IT in
construction research publications, in particular concerning initial content acquisition, are
discussed.
BARRIERS TO CHANGE
Barriers for Open Access Journals
Most Open Access Journals have so far been established by individual pioneers or groups of
academics. The main business model has been to minimize costs and to fund the operations
as a form of open source project, where hardly any transfer of money is involved and all costs

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are absorbed by the employers of the individuals participating. A recent web survey involving
the editors of 55 Open Access journals carried out by Hanken confirmed this to be the
predominant business model, only around 10 % of the journals had explicit budgets (Hedlund
et al 2004).
This business model is very vulnerable to sustain operations in the longer term and for
scaling up from a few papers per year to larger publication volumes, since that might
necessitate employing staff. It’s also not well suited for such journals where copyediting and
layout work of graphics etc cannot be handled by the authors themselves.
Other possible business models, which would provide more funding for professional-level
operations (such as the employment of staff) include advertisement, subsidies from learned
societies or research funding agencies, or author charges, in order to keep the end product
freely available on the web, rather than take recourse to subscription fees (table 1). All of
these have and are being tried out, in different combinations. The most controversial is the
one involving author charges (for instance used by the BioMed Central (biomedcentral 2005)
and Public Library of Science (Plos 2005) journals) since this reverses the role of a publisher
from a seller of a commodity to readers to a provider of services to authors. Getting
individual researchers to pay sums in the order of 500-1500 euros for publication might be
very difficult unless a journal already is regarded as a top-level journal in its field. A way
around this dilemma which is being tried out by BioMed Central is for the publisher entering
into “umbrella agreements” with universities who pay a yearly fee covering all article
submissions of their own faculty.
Yet another model is to publish in a hybrid way with a mixture of subscription and open
access. Each author decides whether his article will be open access, by paying an author

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charge. This model, which was pioneered by Oxford University press, is now for instance
being offered by Springer for all its 1150 journals (Springer 2005).
Advertisement can work in some limited fields of science such as medicine, where for
instance drug companies may have an interest. A very important group of players are the
learned societies, which historically were the ones to start scientific journals as we know
them now. They could see Open Access as an important service for their constituency and
society in general. Unfortunately many learned societies see journal publishing as an internal
profit center generating finance for other activities or an activity, which at least should
generate income enough to cover its cost. From this perspective open access through author
charges would still be acceptable. A further problem is, however, that many offer journal
subscriptions bundled with their membership fees and fear that going open access would
threaten the income from such fees.
The business model issue is central to the further proliferation of Open access journals. The
currently dominating volunteer work only model does not easily scale up to large-scale and
sustainable operations and the other business models need yet to demonstrate their strengths.
Through co-operation or outsourcing of part of the work to commercial companies the
publishers of individual journals could obtain the same economies of scale, branding etc,
which large commercial publishers have today. This would however require changing the
business model from the currently dominating Open Source model.
The behavior of academics as they choose to which journals they submit their papers is to a
very high degree conditioned by the academic reward system. In most universities publishing
in the leading established journals of one’s field is highly rewarded. Often the systems are
quite explicit and include shortlists of journals, numerical weighting schemes etc. Prestige
counts much more than wide and rapid dissemination, and easy access. It has been pointed

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out that the growth in the number of journal titles and the emergence of strong commercial
players in scientific journal publishing in the latter half of the 20th century was due more to a
demand from authors for outlets for the papers they needed to have published in peer
reviewed serials, than for a need of readers of additional titles. The tenure systems in many
countries and periodic comparisons of the scholarly output of university departments are
strong motivating forces for this demand. This system naturally puts academics (and in
particular the younger ones) in a situation where primary publishing of their best work in
relatively unknown Open Access journals is a very low priority.
A system such as this places any new journals, whether subscription-based or Open Access,
in a very disadvantaged position. Only if the journal manages to get a sufficient influx of
high-quality papers it stands a chance of entering into the group of journals with high
prestige, and even then after a delay of a few years. The system is more or less a viscous
circle, where measures such as journal impact factors inhibit change. Recently the ISI has,
however, changed its earlier restrictive policy and currently already indexes 245 open access
journals (ISI 2004).
It is probably idealistic to expect the whole academic community to change its evaluation
system, to take better account of the benefits offered by open access. The experiences of the
past ten years show also that it is very difficult for totally new OA journals to become first
rank journals in their fields. An obvious shortcut is if established journals would change their
business models and become open access, and there are encouraging signs that this is now
starting to happen.
Barriers for Open Access repositories
The situation for Open access repositories, whether subject-specific or institutional, differs
from journals. Most of the content of OA repositories consists of manuscripts which either

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have been submitted for publication or published elsewhere in a non OA mode, and thus
securing the necessary copyright becomes a crucial issue. Many authors do not worry about
these issues for material they put on their own home pages, since they feel they have the
moral right to do so, despite the fact that they may have signed away the full copyright. But
in particular for institutional repositories this is an important issue, since universities could
face law suits from commercial publishers if their repositories would start to contain large
amounts of technically illegal copies. Subject-specific repositories are a middle ground. Since
they are usually run on almost non-existent budgets as open source style operations it would
be hard to find a party (with financial means) to sue. Also a publisher suing such a party
could easily become the object of boycotts and other such actions from the research
community at hand. In this respect the situation differs radically from the situation in other
digital publishing markets such as music and movies. Among academics there is a
widespread belief that publishers generally don’t allow the posting of copies of manuscripts
or finished papers in e-print repositories. The fact is however that a vast majority of
publishers allow this (Sherpa 2005). For instance according to Elsevier’s author gateway web
pages authors retain “the right to post a pre-print version of the article on Internet web sites
including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers
or sites” and “the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final article (to
reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on the author's personal or
institutional web site or server, with a link to the journal home page”.
Another problem with e-print repositories is that it takes a bit of extra effort on behalf of the
researcher to upload the metadata and the manuscripts. Thus there must be some sort of carrot
in the form of hope for more readers and citations that justifies the effort.

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THE SCIX PLATFORM
Functional Specifications for the Platform
The technical work in setting up the SciX software platform was based on the theoretical
work discussed above as well as on the personal experience in setting up electronic journals
and repositories (Martens and Turk, 1999, Fischinger et al., 1998, Turk and Amor, 1999). As
explained in the previous Section there are several open access channels that need to be
addressed by software. The specific requirements that the SciX software was aimed to
address were:
 To provide a flexible architecture, that can be used to support different open access
channels and address the trend in electronic publishing for the separation of the main
functions of publishing.
 Provide an open architecture. The architecture should allow extensions in several
ways, by more or less knowledgeable application developers and programmers. Also
the data managed by the software should be available to 3rd party harvesting for
creating aggregate libraries.
 Provide a modular architecture. There are a number of monolithic digital library
applications on the market. SciX is not competing with them but is trying to
demonstrate that by defining a set of modules implemented as Web services, different
applications can be created very rapidly for the changing requirements.
The SciX platform was aimed to support the following uses:
 support for setting up a generic digital library providing a basis for a topic archive, an
institutional archive or a personal archive,
 support for managing a scientific conference,

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 support for running a refereed journal.
Overall software architecture
All these publication outlets are built around a dozen different business objcts, which are
combined in various ways to provide different functionality, different quality assurance levels
and different levels of establishing the community of authors and readers. Together the
software to support this is called SOPS - SciX Open Publishing Services.
Figure 1 depicts all major components of SOPS. The Figure is described top to bottom.
SciX applications will be used by two main classes of users (the top layer): scientific users
and industry users. Each may have very different roles, such as researcher, editor, reviewer
etc. They interact with the system through applications. The applications are shown on the
second layer of the diagram.
SciX Applications
SciX applications are Web based, meaning they are accessed via a Web browser. They are
shown on the right hand side of the figure in a darkk grey box.These applications include:
Electronic journal. The electronic journal application supports the submission, reviewing,
rewriting, publishing, reading, citing, annotating, discussing etc. of electronic journal papers.
The application is pulling together, in a particular way, the resources offered by some of the
services in the services layer.
Conference support. The conference application supports the registration of participants,
submission of abstracts, reviewing of abstracts, submission of papers, reviewing and
publishing.

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Institutional or topic repository. This is the most basic of all the applications and mainly
provides for access to the repository service. Would include some form of user menagament
and editing.
Personal archive. Similar to the above, without user management or quality control support.
Value Added Publications (VAP). VAP applications provide the normal industry user with
access to industry specific articles such as digests, reviews and summaries that are produced,
by VAP editors and publishers, from SciX digital archives.
The 3rd layer from the top of Figure 1 shows the SciX services. They provide lower level
functionality and logic to the Web Applications defined above. When combined in different
ways they provide the various applications just described.
Third party applications would include citation management software or programs like
Microsoft Word that can access the metadata directly, without Web Browsers, for examples
through Word's Research Task Pane.
Repository service with OAI adapter. The repository service provides basic functionality
such as upload article, check for uniqueness, create unique article ID, remove article from
repository, cross-reference articles, create new version of article, bulk upload articles, harvest
articles from external sources, export articles in standard format, enter & maintain author
details, enter & maintain institution details, retrieve an article by unique id, retrieve article by
key-word search, browse repository via citations, search for similar articles etc. The OAI
adapter provides a standardized interface to the metadata for harvesting and crating aggregate
indexes by third parties.
Knowledge management. The KM service provides enhanced abilities for categorising,
classifying, browsing and searching out information.

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A collection is defined as a bag of repository elements. It is created by a user, for example to
define a reading list for her students or to pick, from the bibliography, a selection of papers
on a given topic.
User management. While anonymous access is important because many people do not like
to be bothered with log-ins and passwords, any active use of the services requires an
identification and other related actions.
Reviews. The reviews service handles the information about reviews and the reviewing
process.
Annotations. The service will allow users to add annotations to articles for their own
reference purposes. Annotations may be personal or public.
Discussions. The service provides support for threaded discussion about works or any other
item.
The data layer provides physical storage of the data associated with each of the business
objects.
The elements of the systems are connected through a variety of protocols including HTTP,
SOAP and OAI-PMH, making use of the Web Services paradigm. Data is exchanged in
HTML, XML and various publication data standards such as BibTex or NROFF.
CONTENT ACQUISITION AND PILOT SERVICES
Spectrum of Services Supported
The technical infrastructure described above has been tested in several services that have
been set up on the Web - more specifically in:
 A system for running an electronic journal (Itcon 2005)

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 topic libraries including a library on construction information technology at
(itc.scix.net) and one for Computer-aided architectural design (cumincad.scix.net)
 scientific society libraries such as the iaps.scix.net and europia.scix.net
 a personal bibliographic archive of the second author (www.zturk.com)
 institutional bibliographic archives
 support for the workflow and on-line archiving of several conferences.
Most of these services have an English user interface, however, SOPS user interface has also
been translated into German, Slovenian and Spanish. In the following Sections some of these
services which should be of particular interest to construction IT researchers are presented.
Open Access Journal
The earlier static HTML-based web pages of the ITcon Journal have been changed to a data-
base driven one. This allows for most editorial and publishing tasks to be performed through
a web browser interface; the published papers also become searchable through the journal's
search engine. When recently the underlying database engine was upgraded to support
syndication news feeds, the journal application can be viewed through syndication news
readers and new papers can be tracked through a mail client's interface. From the editorial
perspective, services were set up that support the following steps in the editorial workflow
process: submission of the paper, assignment of the reviewers, reviewing, tracking reviewer's
work, informing the authors about the review, submission of the final version and the
publishing of it (Figure 2).
Subject-specific repositories
Several subject specific repositories were created using the SciX software including:

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 itc.scix.net. (topic archive) Includes knowledge management, discussions, ratings,
collections. Semi open access model - user registration needed for most functions,
allows end user input. The archive is enhanced with special service that automatically
clusters the papers into groups using statistical text analysis AI methods. (Figure 3).
 iaps.scix.net. (association archive). Rather minimal implementation of the digital
library functionality.
 europia.scix.net (association archive). Digital archive of the EuropIA association that
aims to group together a coherent range of discussions to explore advances in design
sciences and technology.
Other applications
A number of International digital libraries have been set up. These demonstrate that the SciX
platform can be efficiently translated to other languages and set up. Filozofija.scix.net is an
institutional archive - a rather bare bones institutional library with philosophical texts in
Slovenian language. Architektur-informatik.scix.net is a topic archive. It supports a German
speaking association on the use of IT in Architecture. Raumplanung.scix.net is an
institutional archive of a department at the TU Vienna.
Content acquisition and gaining critical mass
A critical factor in the success for any OA repository or journal is its ability to attract a steady
stream of good paper submissions. Even if there is a credible amount of content when a
service is first launched readers will not come back unless there is new content of interest.
One can distinguish between author push and publisher pull repositories. While some push or
pull happens with just about every service, the electronic journal and conference publications
have a mainly author push flavor. After a journal or a conference track has established itself

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as a relevant source of quality information, it is the authors that wish their publications
appearing in these outlets. The phase of establishing a following is typically longer for
societal and institutional digital libraries. Up to date, most can be labeled “publisher pull”. A
substantial effort from the organizer of the archive has been dedicated to ensuring the
content. The experiences concerning content acquisition in the SciX project are described
more in detail in a paper by Martens et al (2002).
CONCLUSIONS
The SciX Open Publication Services software has been developed and tested in real
applications. The tool is flexible enough to support future requirements, which may emerge
as the result of the business process re-engineering, and experience of the system in use.
The architecture is open and modular, based on a three layer Web services approach, and
makes use of industry open standards where possible. A number of core SciX applications are
provided, and the architecture will allow additional applications to be created either by the
SciX consortium, or by more or less knowledgeable third-party application developers and
programmers. Also the data managed by the pilots will be available to 3rd party harvesting
using the emerging OAI standard.
A key aspect of the SciX architecture is to demonstrate that by defining a set of modules
implemented as Web services, different applications can be created very rapidly and adapted
for changing requirements. The architecture presented in the document will support such a
demonstration.
The practical experience of building and populating the pilot systems should be of particular
interest to the global research community engaged in construction IT research. In building
discipline-specific repositories co-operation with professional associations that organize
regular conference series is essential. One of the lessons of this project is that it isn’t always

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easy to convince associations that bundle access to proceedings with membership or
conference fees, to allow the material to be made freely accessible on the web and the right
arguments and business models need to be found.
Open access provides increased readership within the research community itself but perhaps
more importantly it increases readership by industry experts. In an area such as civil
engineering this is very useful for research results to have an impact on practice. This is
particularly important for conference papers of which copies have been posted to e-print
repositories, since such papers now become easily searchable by general search engines.
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<http://www.isinet.com/media/presentrep/acropdf/impact-oa-journals.pdf> (May, 1,
2006)
Itcon (2005). Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction.
<http://www.itcon.org/> (May, 1, 2006)
Lawrence, S. (2001). “Online or Invisible?” Nature, 411(6837), 521.
<http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/> (May, 1, 2006)
Martens, B. and Turk, Z. (1999). “Working Experiences with a Cumulative Index on CAD:
"CUMINCAD"”, Proceedings, ECAADE99 Conference, Turing to 2000, Liverpool,
Spetember 15-17, 1999. 327-333.
Martens, B., Björk, B.-C., Turk, Z. (2002 ). “The SciX Project: Re-Engineering from Paper-
based to Free Electronic.” ACADIA 2002 Conference, Pomona (LA), USA, 179-185,
<http://www.scix.net> (May, 1, 2006)
OAI (2005). Open Archives Initiative. <http://www.openarchives.org/> (May, 1, 2006)
PloS (2005). Public Library of Science, <http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/> (May, 1,
2006)
ROMEO 2004. RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving),
<http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/> (May, 1, 2006)
Sherpa 2005. Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving. Web database. University of
Nottingham, <http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php> (May, 1, 2006)

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Spinger 2005. Spinger Open Choice. Information to journal article authors,
<http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,4-40359-0-0-0,00.html>
(May, 1, 2006)
Turk, Z.and Amor, R. (1999). “Architectural Foundations of a Constrcution Information
Network.” International Journal of Construction Information Technology, 7.(2) 85-
97.

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Type of access
Business model
Delivery medium
Paper
Electronic
Closed access
Pay-per-view
*
*
Journal subscription
*
*
Bundled subscription
*
*
Open access
“Open source”
*
Advertisement
*
External grants
*
Author charges
*
Bundled author charges
*
Limited
open access
Delayed Open Access
*
Limited functionality
*
Table 1: Different business models for running electronic journals in the print and electronic world (Björk
2004).

24
Other Applications
SciX Data
layer
SciX Business objects and Web services layer
SciX Web Applications - providing functionality to end user
electronic
journal
MS Word as
client
institutional
or topic
repository
conference
support
Scientific
User
Value added
publications
Industry
User
datadatadatadatadatadata
Metadata
Harvester
data
self
archiving
3rd party
application
Annota-
tions Discu-
ssions
Knowledge
mngmnt. Reviews
User
mngmnt.
OAi
adapter Collect-
ions
Works
Other
Repository
data
3rd party
WebSite
Figure 1: Logical architecture of the SciX pilot showing all major SciX and 3rd party components

25
Figure 2. SciX software has been used to improve the functionality of the web site of an existing journal, the
Electronic Journal of Information Technology in construction.
Figure 3. Metadata display of the ITC.SciX.net. Note the built in clustering features.