Electronic journals: publishing via Internet's World Wide Web

The feasibility of publishing an electronic journal which will be accepted by the scientific community has always been hampered by factors such as a lack of standardisation of data transmission codes, limitations regarding the incorporation of graphics and photographs, as well as the absence of special columns, book reviews, letters to the editor, product reviews and advertisements. Standardised communication protocols such as TCP/IP have brought this dream one step closer to reality. The final step could be an electronic journal published through the World Wide Web (WWW), currently one of the frequently used Internet navigators. Three WWW specifications provide the ideal arena for electronic journal publishing: URL (uniform resource locator), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), and HTML (hypertext markup language). These specifications provide a standardised structure for storing, accessing and sending data, including multimedia (even sound and video) files. The possibilities of such a structure for electronic journal publishing are remarkable: full‐text retrieval could not only be by keyword but also by following hypertext links across articles — even to nodes in other computer systems. In this article the possibilities of publishing via the Web will be addressed and some hints for setting up and maintaining a multimedia scholarly journal will be provided.