Linking Everything to Everything: Journal Publishing Myth or Reality?

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 EPÂ?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