| Dear Readers: Here is the pilot issue J.UCS 0,0 (1994) of the Journal of Universal
Computer Science. J.UCS is a refereed journal dealing with all aspects
of computer science: hence the pretentious term "universal". Its
contributions are published in electronic form, but also (at the end
of each year) in a printed and a CD ROM version by Springer
Pub.Co. The format of all papers is - up to small details such as page
numbering - identical in the electronic and the printed versions. This
makes it easy to quote papers in exactly the form you are used to from
more traditional journals. This pilot issue is somewhat different from all other issues of J.UCS:
it does not contain scientific refereed material but papers of general
interest concerning hypermedia electronic publishing. Also, it is the
only issue that will not appear in print: of course you can hardcopy
any part of it yourself! The first issue with refereed material will
appear in January 95. This issue starts with a substantial paper by Odlyzko analyzing the
basic reason for electronic journals like J.UCS: technical journals in
printed form are doomed, and will not survive much longer,
particularly in areas where computer networks are quite widespread,
such as in computer science! It is followed by an overview of
applications of hypermedia systems by Lennon et al.: electronic
publishing is just one of the many uses of networked hypermedia
systems; and since all educational J.UCS servers provide full
hypermedia capabilities they may also be used for other purposes. The
third paper by Calude et al. explains the basic philosophy of J.UCS:
it was the seminal paper that got J.UCS off the ground. The third
paper by Schmaranz and myself is a somewhat more technical description
of J.UCS: it also compares J.UCS to other efforts. In the fifth paper
Andrews et al. explain why it was necessary to use a "second
generation" hypermedia system as basis of J.UCS: "first generation"
systems such as the popular WWW do not provide enough functionality
for a serious publishing effort. The final paper by Lennon et al. puts
multimedia and the internet in a new perspective: a printed version of
this has recently appeared in Datamation. In addition to the journal proper you find a list of the editorial
board of J.UCS: many of the editors have made material such as a CV, a
photo or a list of publications available, so that J.UCS readers can
look up who is doing what in which area. There are also two lists of
J.UCS servers: the first one is the List of Publicly Accessible J.UCS Servers;
the second is a complete list of all places currently
running or planning to run a J.UCS server: either their full server is
not operational yet or else the organisation at issue does not want to
provide access to users outside their LAN. Finally, you can find a
complete list of Computing Review Categories as they are used for
classification of papers: the classification scheme of ACM's Computing
Reviews has been adopted with the permission of the ACM; categories
are hyperlinked with editors, so you can find out who is in charge of
what areas and vice versa. Let me conclude this with a few technical remarks: J.UCS is running on
a network of Hyper-G servers. You may not feel much of this when you
use one of the WWW viewers such as Mosaic; however, notice that
functions like full text search even within user defined scopes are
possible and - once more than one journal is installed on the same
basis - even searches across even server boundaries and a number of
other neat features are available. Maybe you want to have a closer
look at Hyper-G and its native viewers Harmony and Amadeus that make
optimal use of Hyper-G's features, yet allow to peruse e.g. WWW,
Gopher and WAIS much as you are used to, with automatic caching thrown
in for you. Try the FTP server iicm.tu-graz.ac.at in directory
pub/Hyper-G for further info and software, after you have read the
pertinent papers in JUCS 0,0 i.e. the current issue! The use of online electronic hypermedia journals is traditionally slow
due to network delays. I hope that you find J.UCS somewhat better
since we don't use a single server, but a network of servers: please
try to use a server with which you have a fast communication link or,
better still, you may want to install a J.UCS server in your own Local
Area Network. Since the software is free and installation is easy
this is the best solution if J.UCS is used reasonably frequently in
your organisation. Finally, the current J.UCS editorial board is quite substantial. But
covering all aspects of computer science is also a momentuous task!
Thus, if you are interested in joining the editorial board, please
send me an email with a vitae, and with the name of one or two of the
members of the current editorial board who know you: the J.UCS
editorial board will be continuously increased by eminent computer
scientists. However, we will make an attempt to cover all areas fairly
evenly, in both the scientific and geographic sense. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, points of criticism
or such, please send them to me: I will answer all of them
personally. I will also mention issues of general interest in the
Column of the Managing Editor of the always next issue of J.UCS. For now: good reading! If you have a nice contribution, please don't
forget to submit it to J.UCS: this may well be the fastest way to get
something quotable published; and since J.UCS is a refereed journal
with a printed version and (I hope you agree!) a great editorial board
it has all the prestige you may want. Yours sincerely Hermann Maurer, Managing Editor Graz University of Technology,
Graz / Austria
hmaurer@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at
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