Linking Everything to Everything: Journal Publishing Myth or Reality?
Steve M. Hitchcock, Les A. Carr, F. Quek, Wendy Hall, Andrew Witbrock,
Ian Tarr
In Proceedings ICCC/IFIP conference on Electronic Publishing 97: New
Models and Opportunities.
Reference lists are an important facet of the modern academic journal.
This form of 'hyperlinking' becomes enormously more powerful when translated to
the World Wide Web, both in terms of the speed of link following and in the
number of linked documents that can be made accessible. Electronic Press Ltd
(EP), one of the first commercial publishers to commit to electronic publishing
on the Web, plans to extend the practice of citation linking, aiming to link a
document not just to a cited source but to all other documents that contain
relevant information. Relevance in this case is defined as all referring, or
referred to, documents. The paper discusses EP’s approach to link creation on
this scale, which is based on an internalised system. One way of extending this
approach is to support link creation as well as link following on a distributed
network such as the Web. The Open Journal Project has built some first
demonstrations, which are outlined in the paper. The convergence between these
two approaches suggests some important new motivations for online journal
publishing. Some of these features will eventually transform journal usage.