J.UCS - The Next Generation in Electronic Journal Publishing

Hermann Maurer (IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria, Austria)

Klaus Schmaranz (IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria, Austria)

Abstract: In this paper we first discuss briefly why electronic journals today have a rather moderate success. We then describe J.UCS - the Journal of Universal Computer Science - an electronic journal that is the prototype for electronic publishing in the future. Using Hyper-G for distribution it provides all search and navigation mechanisms of large scale hypermedia systems and therefore makes it easy to locate interesting articles. Readers can perform variable scope searches to find papers, then they can browse them on screen either in hypertext mode or in high quality PostScript mode, or they can get high quality PostScript documents for printing. Even PostScript documents provide full hyperlink support when reading them on screen. Articles in J.UCS can be accessed very fast using a wide net of servers distributed all over the world. J.UCS also supports annotations to existing articles informing the readers of new research results or errors. Writing articles for J.UCS is very easy using PostScript as the main submission format, even standard hyperlinks such as literature references are generated automatically. We close this paper with a short comparison of J.UCS to other electronic journals and with an outlook on future developments.

Keywords: Hyper-G, J.UCS, electronic journals, electronic publishing