Link Accessibility in Electronic Journal Articles

The prevalence of online scholarly, technical work is increasing at a great rate. In 1995, Hitchcock, Carr, and Hall [6] reported that there were 115 scholarly peer-reviewed online journals in Science and Technology, plus a comparable number in the Social Sciences; in 1999 Maclennan [9] estimated that 10,000 electronic journals were in existence. With this increase in electronic literature, the idea of interlinking online documents is growing more attractive. Cornell is one of several places engaged in exploring methods for reference linking the online literature, partly through its involvement in the Open Citation project, and partly though research being done for CNRI. The DOI-X project is a similar effort being carried out by commercial journal publishers [7]. References are provided by human authors who know the literature; increasingly, these are accompanied by URLs provided by the authors. The reference linking project aims to amplify this effort by looking up online locations for references that are not accompanied by URLs. In either case, the URLs will be followed to access the cited document directly. Reference links are the best tool for repository interoperability.