| dc.description.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. | en |
