This document describes some of the requirements for electronic journals and explains the technology needed to edit and publish them. Editing in particular receives close attention: while the technology relieves the publisher of many of the chores of typesetting and formatting in multiple environments, the exercise of editorial control remains a task only a human can do.
The Electronic Publishing Unit provides a platform for journals (using the Cocoon framework) which enables the edited articles to be uploaded for immediate publication. A working example is available online (Schewe & Even, 2007).
- Scenario
Journal for Drama and Theatre in Foreign and Second Language Education (http://research.ucc.ie/scenario/)
- Irish Journal of Public Policy (IJPP)
A peer-reviewed journal for politics, political science, government, public policy and public administration (http://research.ucc.ie/ijpp/)
- The Boolean
Snapshots of Doctoral Research at University College Cork (http://research.ucc.ie/boolean/)
- Aigne
The online postgraduate journal of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences (http://research.ucc.ie/aigne/)
The eJournal system was recently presented at the Online Education @ UCC symposium (paper, slides).
October 2011
1. Why electronic?
What was wrong with paper?
Nothing—in fact with documents of any length, most people prefer to print off what they want to read and sit down somewhere comfortable, or take it away with them, which is why our pages provide a button.
But as Sperberg-McQueen (1998) points out, it's important to keep copies online for other people to refer to, for several reasons:
people who read it can cite it in their own writing.
you can point people to the whole thing so that others can read it.
you can point people to a specific location within the document, so that you can draw someone's attention to a particular section or phrase.
references to the document (or the journal as a whole, or a specific issue) can be found online when people search for it, especially if the document or journal forms part of the public profile of the institution or the individual.
1.1. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic’ (Clarke, 1984)
There's nothing magic about publishing a journal electronically: it still needs work. The technology makes it faster and easier to do the final act of publishing, but you still have to locate authors, gather articles, sift the wheat from the chaff, ask for changes, and (most importantly) edit the articles to publication-quality standards (see the panel ‘How much leeway do you allow your authors?’). This means you need a designed style for the journal, to which all articles must conform (see section 2.2, ‘Stylesheets’). Authors usually understand this, but it is your job as editor to enforce it.
Publication is where the technology comes into its own, because the details of formatting are handled by the stylesheets: all the editor has to do is make sure that everything in each article is labelled with the correct style name (a process called ‘marking-up’). With a suitable stylesheet, this only takes a few minutes per article, unless an author needs something particularly unusual.1
One author needed to reproduce some text typeset in a triangle, in a footnote, within the text of the footnote. This kind of thing always needs manual intervention. ⇚
1.2. Getting started
Schewe, Manfred and Even, Susanne (Eds): Scenario (2007), URI:〈http://scenario.ucc.ie/〉.
: Busman's Honeymoon (1937), Hodder & Stoughton, London.
: Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination (1984) in Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible, pp. 14, 21, 36, Henry Holt, Baltimore, MD.
: How to make your documents last longer than ten minutes (1998) in Occasional Lectures on Documents, 10 October 1998, University College Cork (UCC Computer Centre/CELT Project) [in preparation].
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