Online Journals

Electronic information is gaining more importance in academic activities with the extreme change in the pattern of dissemination of knowledge. Web technology provides dynamism to the electronic documents that were not possible in essentially sequential style of presentation of printed documents. Interactive hyperlinks to related resources, links to full range of multimedia, links to traditional indexing and abstracting services, etc. are some of the novelties that are common place in a Web document and that were not possible in a traditional printed document. Web publishers or e-journal publishers claim heavy investments. Publishers create not only bit-map page image but also HTML and PDF formats to provide added advantages for their electronic journals. Electronic journals can provide linking citations and references to bibliographic databases or to full-text articles (where possible), links to graphics/photographs, video or audio clippings not included in the paper, links to corrections or to articles cited in the paper, access to more detailed data or to multimedia information provided by the author, links to external databases, links to reader comments or discussion forums related to the paper, “dual publishing” in more than one electronic journal (e.g. a chemistry article of interest to biologists could appear both in a chemistry and a biology journal), a “living article” where the user could log in at any time and see an experiment on an ongoing basis showing data collected that day, embedded software programs allowing users to mirror the authors’ work by manipulating data or running simulations based on their own input.