On the Future of Journals: Digital Publishing and Argumentation

The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have profound implications for the dissemination of scholarly work, particularly in the area of submission, review, and publication of journals. However to date, much of the impact of these new technologies has been on digitising the products of journal publication; the scholarly processes involved in reviewing journal publications remain unchanged and unsupported. We are using computer-supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA) tools to rethink and redesign the process of scholarly debate at the heart of journal reviewing. This paper describes the design principles behind our Csca approach, how they are currently being realised in the context of a specific new journal publication, and discusses some of the issues that this approach raises.

Publication(s)

To be presented at HCI'96, Annual HCI Conference of the British Computer Society, London, 20-23 August, 1996.