Wednesday 3rd December 1997

at Southampton University

Chair: Chris Bell (Plymouth University)
Present: David Barron, Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad, Steve Harris, Steve Hitchcock (Southampton University), David Brailsford, David Evans, Steve Probets (Nottingham University), David Brown (BIDS), Tony Hammond (Academic Press), Ian Jones (British Computer Society), Robert Kimberley (Institute for Scientific Information), Freddie Quek (BioMedNet Ltd), Nick Rowley (Chapman & Hall), Richard Skaer, Owen Garrett (Company of Biologists), Philippe Thoirey (OUP).

Formal presentations included David Brailsford with a short history of the project and its motivations, emphasising the need for 'separable hyperstructures'. Robert Kimberley identified linking as a core activity for a secondary publisher such as ISI. Possible models for developing link strategies between publishers were suggested.

To date most of the link creation in the project has been handled at the project's two research centres at Southampton and Nottingham Universities. A version of the linking software tools was recently installed at the publisher Company of Biologists (COB). Owen Garrett has managed this work at COB and very briefly described his first impressions as successful and positive. Les Carr presented demonstrations of the three Open Journals created by the project, including keyword linking in biology - running from the remote COB link server on this occasion - citation linking in cognitive science and, for the first time, combining keyword and citation elements for the computer science Open Journal.

The subsequent discussion touched on issues such as linking to TeX documents, the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), and the motivations for linking in different publishing scenarios, within primary and secondary publishers, by new electronic publishers, journal aggregators and journal subscription agents. Finally, it was noted that the software being used in the project for linking applications is available for trial by any partners that wish to use it. Robert Kimberley added that ISI would be happy to provide some citation data for use by publishers who wanted to experiment with linking.
 

[Top]    [Presentations at other meetings]    [The Open Journal Project]