"A serious discussion on some of the ways an academic press might go beyond traditional publication programs"

The Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing (CEDP) is a new entity. In planning its agenda for a projected 21st-century publishing house at Clemson to emphasize new technology and new approaches to communication, the CEDP announces an inter-disciplinary colloquium that will engage the university and the public in a discussion on the virtual revolution that is occurring in scholarly publishing and communications due to the impact of electronic and digital media. One attractive aspect of the initiative at Clemson is the way founding such a distinctive press will serve both students and faculty in the production and dissemination of "the best that has been built, created, performed, and written," according to our mission statement. Indeed, our imprint already conceives of a niche market for an essay series and for online publications that will examine self-reflexively the practice, issues, and problems of publishing scholarship on the World Wide Web.

While yet taking shape in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities in August 2000, CEDP decided that we wanted to invite participants from regional colleges and universities to join us for a serious discussion on some of the ways an academic press might go beyond traditional publication programs, avoiding current pitfalls of print journals and books without incurring undue additional ones in the cost of electronic publishing, on the one hand, and considering legal and professional concerns about intellectual property and maintaining editorial standards, on the other. Such topics will be aired in the Colloquium on New Technology and the Future of Publishing, to be held at the Strom Thurmond Institute's Self Auditorium on April 5, 2000. Our goal resembles that of the Iowa Board of Regents' Interinstitutional Task Force on Scholarly Communication, which provocatively issued a bulletin entitled Crisis in Scholarly Communication: What Is the Impact on the Iowa Regents Institutions? The last, however, seems not to have considered that innovative teaching strategies and interdisciplinary scholarship are inherent to the discussion of the current "crisis in scholarly communication" when the new media are involved. Technology, as "new knowledge," is one of the products a university has most to sell. We plan to collect the work of our invited speakers in a proceedings volume that we will publish at no charge on the Internet.