"Automated Refereeing Support for an E-Journal"

Supervised by A.Simons

Abstract

Journals are costly, but prestigious. Online journals are often less costly, but find it harder to gain respect. By having a rigorous peer review system they can gain both prestige and the respect of their readers. Academics want wider dissemination of their work, easier, free access to other work and faster turnaround to publication.

The journal produced would be widely accessible, as it would be online and also free. There would be a strict peer reviewing system and papers will not be published unless they first passed through this system. The journal would ideally take advantage of all the facilities it can offer by virtue of being electronic, that would be impossible in an ordinary paper journal and in this way become valued and held in high esteem by academics within its field. The approach used to achieve this aim is a quite specific one, outlined in the introduction.

The work completed in this project is to set up the facility for academics to submit articles and then have the articles reviewed or review other articles. An editor can then look at the articles that have been reviewed, see the reviewer's comments and decide if they should be published the paper in question. The next stage of this project, which is to be completed by a future student, concerns the issue of checking the reviews and dealing with the process for resubmission of papers.