Meta-Surfaces

Those interested in creating an electronic scholarly journal, or in converting an already existing journal into a form appropriate for Internet publishing will find a number of ideas and recipes in the following document, somewhat mischievously named Meta-Surfaces.

Meta-Surfaces does not claim to give answers to all problems to all people, but enough is assembled here to begin the task. It includes choices that may not please averybody, but justifications are given. The problems we try to solve in a particular way may have better and particularly easier solutions, but if you know of any, please share them with and we will change our document accordingly. We may even change Surfaces accordingly... :-)

With your help, comments and criticisms, we will improve this document and will keep it at the disposal of all those interested in scholarly electronic publishing.

Meta-Surfaces

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Ends and Means to grow a viable electronic scholarly journal

A. General remarks about scholarly journals.

I Introduction.

II Basic philosophical principles in the design of scholarly journals.

III Economic and financial considerations.

IV The question of unanticipated consequences.

B. Practical design of a scholarly electronic journal.

I General practical design principles.

II Receiving and preparing papers.

III Choosing publishing formats for an electronic scholarly publication

i. Proprietary solutions. Why some were used in the past. Why they should generally be avoided.

ii. ASCII files.

iii. Producing a pre-publishing format. Paginating electronic documents.

iv. Publishing on the web: HTML vs. SGML.

v. Graphic formats.

vi. Sound and animation.

IV Mirrors.

V Preserving the integrity of the text.

VI Designing a full-text search engine.

VII Conclusion.