TOWARDS UNIVERSAL LINKING FOR ELECTRONIC JOUNRNALS Steve Hitchcock, Freddie Quek, Leslie Carr, Wendy Hall, Andrew Witbrock, and Ian Tarr Hitchcock is Research Assistant, Open Journal Project, Mul- timedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton SO17 IBJ, United Kingdom <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>; Quek is Infor- mation Systems Manager, BioMedNet Ltd., 34-42 Cleveland Street, Middlesex House, London W 1 P 6LB United Kingdom <freddie@cursci.co.uk>; Carr is Research Fellow, Open Journal Project, Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southamp- ton SO17 lBJ, United Kingdom <lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk>; Hall is Head, Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southamp- ton, SO17 IBJ, United Kingdom <wh@ecs.soton.ac.uk>; Witbrock is Technical Director, Electronic Press Ltd., 34-42 Cleveland Street, Middlesex House, London WlP 6LB, United Kingdom <andrew@cursci.co.uk>; and Tarr is Man- aging Director, Current Drugs, Ltd., 34-42 Cleveland Street, Middlesex House, London W 1P 6LB, United Kingdom <ian@cursci.co.uk>. BioMed Net Limited and Electronic Press Limited are part of Elsevier Science. Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this paper was first presented at the ICCC/IFIP conference on Electronic Publishing ‘97: New Models and Opportunities held in Can- terbury, UK, in April 1997. The Open Journal project is funded in the UK by JISC’s Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) award ELP2/35. More information about the project is available at http://joumals.ecs.soton.ac.uk PDF linking applications were developed by Professor David Bra&ford, Steve Probets and David Evans in the EPRG at Nottingham University. -TOWARDSUNIVERSAI,LINKINGFORELECTRONICJOURNALS- Commercially produced online journals are entering a new phase. In a little over a year those publishers that were among the first to make substantial journal pro- grams available online have begun to add features which are not directly available in corresponding print editions. The agenda has moved on from how you put journals online to how those journals can be enhanced. Prior to the wider availability of online journals, talk of enhancements tended to focus on the idea of “multi- media” content. Although some fields such as medicine and biology may be in a position to build and use such materials, the widespread realization of audio-visual support for essentially text-based journals, as well as an adequate network infrastructure to distribute such materials, is still some way off. Instead, attention has focused on the hypertext link. In fact, links are a vital component of integrating mul- timedia content created in widely differing formats. But as far as online journals are concerned, the first application of links on a large scale extends a conven- tion that is fundamental to the modem academic jour- nal: the use of citations. Through reference lists within primary journal arti- cles and the proliferation of secondary information sources-indexing and abstracting services, reviews, etc.-the journal literature is intrinsically “hyper- linked,” but the online medium is a more natural envi- ronment for this feature. The essence of the online environment is speed of access to the linked materials. ’ VOL. 24, No. 1 (SPRING1998) 21