Publishing on the Web

It is now very easy to publish your courses, papers, books and journals on the Web. This email will tell you how.

My own experience:
I've been amazed at the number of people who have read my unfinished book while I write it on the web - see http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Brewer/divorce.htm I get about 700 visitors per month (that's visitors, not visits - if they read every chapter or come back 100 times a month, they are only counted once). About 1/5 of these look through every chapter. As a result, the latest book published on divorce (Stephen Clark: "Putting Asunder") spends a great deal of time interacting with me, even though I haven't published on paper yet. To protect myself from plagiarism, I have omitted my footnotes, and I have put a copyright sign on each page. Strictly speaking, neither of these is necessary, because any written work is automatically copyrighted under UK and USA law as soon as it is published, even without the copyright sign. Several publishers now publish books free on the web before selling them in paper form. They do this for publicity. If you are going to use it seriously, you will need to buy a copy so that you can quote the page numbers. This is a trend which can only grow. For examples see: http://www.books.mcgraw-hill.com/betabooks.html

Why not publish your next book on the web?
Free web space and free publishing tools Most firms offer 5Mb of free space, which is large enough for a book the size of the Bible. Many offer much more space. For 100 Mb of space (and more if you ask for it) go to: http://www.free-online.co.uk/
Some also offer free web-construction tools so you can just paste in your text from your word processor. Eg http://www.tripod.co.uk/

If you get more ambitious, there are good free web-publishing tools such as Arachnophilia: http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/

Lecture courses and student interaction on the Web
You can publish anything on the web, including your lecture courses. Blackboard.com even makes it possible to interact with your students, protect pages with a password, and conduct seminars and class tests online. Everything is already set up, except the course which you can paste in. It is free unless you charge for your course. http://www.blackboard.com/

Online Journals
In the science world, people are used to reading journal articles before they are published and used to reading whole journals online which are never published on paper. In the Biblical Studies world we have only a few examples, the best of which is TC: http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/TC.html
The editors of this journal are very helpful with regard to fonts and style if anyone is trying to set up their own.
If you publish your research on the web, I will be happy to link to your site from your entry in the Tyndale pages, if you send me your web address.

Updates Mar. 2000
Quite a few Tyndale Fellowship members have responded to my mailing about publishing on the Web. Some of their examples have been instructive:

David Gill produces PowerPoint presentations which he puts on the web in this format. If your computer has PowerPoint (part of Microsoft Office), they will run within your Browser. When you click on a link you may be offered a choice between running the file or downloading it. Run it, and you will view it in your browser. Click on each page to move to the next. Examples at: http://www.swan.ac.uk/classics/modules/level1/clh107.htm
He does the same thing with RTF files, eg: http://www.swan.ac.uk/classics/staff/dg/bsa/marshall/marshall.rtf

John Montgomery edits the online GLOBAL JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL THEOLOGY. It is found at: http://www.trinitysem.edu/journal/journalindex.html He has also produced some pages incorportating video clips from an interview, which is played back by Quicktime. See http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/index.html

Chrys Caragounis is on the editorial board of a new online journal, the JOURNAL OF GRECO-ROMAN CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM at http://www.jgrchj.com/ Their layout is impressive, and you can choose from a variety of Greek fonts. This has only just started and there are very few articles yet. Articles will only remain online till the printed copy is on sale at the end of each year.

Chris Forbes puts a lot of his teaching on the web, along with weekly reading lists for his students, and he uses the Macquarie University online forums for interacting with his students (similar facilities are available at blackboard.com). See Chris' teaching homepage at http://www.anchist.mq.edu.au/cforbes/default.htm
His use of frames for displaying footnotes is not new, but it is a nice uncluttered example of how to do it. See http://www.anchist.mq.edu.au/251/ThieringFrames.htm

John Capper has created a few courses using Blackboard.com. Normally they require registration and a password to view them, but he has opened up one of them for us to look at. Click on "Guest" at: http://www.blackboard.com/courses/TWB282/