Electronic Publishing of Academic Papers

Software	Web Page building tools, including a language for sophisticated server-side programming
Covers	Web application development, possibly sociology of academic research
Skills Required	Programming in XHTML and a procedural or object oriented language, preferably Java, curiosity about what academics do for a living
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

Electronic distribution of academic research papers and other documents is fast becoming vitally important to research. In some fields, including large areas of Physics, you can't keep up if you're not aware of new results long before they're published in journals. Even in slower-moving disciplines, journals and books (and inter-library loans) are very expensive, so it's difficult and expensive to find all the previous research directly relevant to your own work. Pulling papers off the web can be very quick and effective, if you know where to find them. If you know what you want, checking for titles is easy, but if you're looking for work you don't know about, using Google can work well or be very frustrating - and you can miss important work if you didn't think of the right search terms.

So there's a clear need for lists and bibliographies to help researchers track down electronically published papers. I've seen a couple of document archives but I found them very unhelpful. The objective of this project is to develop a web application to support researchers who want to make their papers available to others, and to support researchers who want to find papers on particular subjects.

Extensions

A tool that allows the users to add information about and pointers to their papers (encoded in various formats), with keywords for different subjects, so that other users can search for papers with particular keywords. Such a tool would require access for moderators with the power to delete entries, or vet them before they are made available.

Variants

A shell to support an electronic journal, like The Journal of Interactive Media Education published by the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University (see http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/).

Publication of academic papers serves a number of social functions besides simply making the papers available to people who might want to read them. What sort of tools and social institutions are needed to make paper journal publication obsolete? Can you build a tool to enable the electronic publication revolution to happen?

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