A Framework for Academic Electronic Journal Publications

Abstract

Academic journals are the backbone of scholarly communication and the preservation of knowledge. For years they have served as a record of progression and an archive of academic debate. They are the medium through which new discoveries become tenets of science, and burgeoning ideas develop into contemporary knowledge. Unfortunately, an increase in both production and distribution costs imposed by commercial publishers over the last decade, has begun to stifle the ideological purpose of journals. Too often libraries are finding themselves having to settle on a select number of journals that they can subscribe to because of these rises in costs. This leads to an obvious suppression of the natural flow of knowledge through academia. The processes behind the creation of an academic journal have yet to be standardised, and, as such, journals can subscribe to a variety of different approaches. Journals are most commonly comprised through peer review of potential articles, thus guaranteeing the academic validity of the final publication. However, this is a long and drawn out process for many organisations. New communication technologies have the capacity to make the interaction between editors, reviewers and authors more efficient, thus accelerating the objective of the dissemination of modern knowledge. The introduction of electronic journals has been seen as the solution to these problems. However, until now, there has been no standardised framework from which organisations can freely explore and develop this option. The following dissertation presents a generic and flexible model of the peer review process, and describes the design and implementation of such a framework. The system created provides a generic, open source solution to creating, managing and maintaining a peer-review academic electronic journal. Also included, is a review of the technological initiatives that have affected the area of electronic journal publication.