Electronic Publishing -- a Journal and its Production

The use of the term "Electronic Publishing" transcends any notions of the paperless office and of a purely electronic transfer and dissemination of information over networks. It now encompasses all computer-assisted methods for the production of documents and includes the imaging of a document on paper as one of the options to be provided by an integrated processing scheme. Electronic publishing draws heavily on techniques from computer science and information technology but technical, legal, financial and organisational problems have to be overcome before it can replace traditional publication mechanisms. These problems are illustrated with reference to the publication arrangements for the journal `Electronic Publishing Origination, Dissemination and Design'. The authors of this paper are the co-editors of this journal, which appears in traditional form and relies on a wide variety of support from electronic technologies in the pre-publication phase.

Linking electronic journals - Lessons from the Open Journal project

The Open Journal project has completed its three year period of funding by the UK Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme (Rusbridge 1998). During that time, the number of journals that are available electronically leapt from a few tens to a few thousand. Some of these journals are now developing the sort of features the project has been advocating, in particular the use of links within journals, between different primary journals, with secondary journals data, and to non-journal sources. Assessing the achievements of the project and considering some of the difficulties it faced, we report on the different approaches to linking that the project developed, and summarise the important user responses that indicate what works and what does not. Looking ahead, there are signs of change, not just to simple linking within journals but to schemes in which links are the basis of "distributed" journals, where information may be shared and documents built from different sources. The significance has yet to be appreciated, but this would be a major change from printed journals. If projects such as this and others have provided the initial impetus, the motivation for distributed journals comes, perhaps surprisingly, from within certain parts of the industry, as the paper shows.