The Development of an On-line Submission and Peer Review System

Online submission and peer review is emerging as the next step forward for many journal publishers in an ever increasing drive to take advantage of technological improvements in transferring data electronically over the internet. The Electronic Submission and PEer REview (ESPERE) project was initiated in 1996 as an electronic Libraries (eLib) initiative of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Subsequently the project continued as a self-funding group composed of a consortium of learned society and commercial journal publishers intent on utilising the changes in technology to improve the services they provide to their authors as well as cutting their costs and increasing efficiencies.

New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet

In this article we analyse the emergence of Internet activity addressing the experiences of young people in two British communities: South Asian and Chinese.We focus on two web sites: www.barficulture.com and www.britishbornchinese.org.uk, drawing on interviews with site editors, content analysis of the discussion forums, and E-mail exchanges with site users. Our analysis of these two web sites shows how collective identities still matter, being redefined rather than erased by online interaction. We understand the site content through the notion of reflexive racialisation. We use this term to modify the stress given to individualisation in accounts of reflexive modernisation. In addition we question the allocation of racialised meaning from above implied by the concept of racialisation. Internet discussion forums can act as witnesses to social inequalities and through sharing experiences of racism and marginalisation, an oppositional social perspective may develop. The online exchanges have had offline consequences: social gatherings, charitable donations and campaigns against adverse media representations. These web sites have begun to change the terms of engagement between these ethnic groups and the wider society,and they have considerable potential to develop new forms of social action.