Supporting collaboration in digital journal production

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Abstract
As digital journals come into use there arise new possibilities for the computer support of the group processes that are involved in developing, editing, reviewing, revising, annotating, and generally using a publication. There are now a number of products and research tools designed to support group‐writing teams that can be extended to support a wider range of interacting roles and activities. Most, however, require use of nonmainstream word‐processing systems, and usually assume that full information is continuously available through a network to mediate and avoid conflicts. In the context of digital journals, it is more realistic to suppose that they will be distributed through both on‐line and off‐line media, and that a requirement for continuous network access would severely limit their use. This article reports research on group‐writing tools that deviate as little as possible from conventional word processors and assume only intermittent network connection for document exchange and conflict resolution. The system developed can be used by some people as a conventional word processor, by others as a versioning and text and sound annotation system, and by others as a full hypertext system, all while working with the same corpus of documents. It offers full typographic and page‐layout facilities and imports typographic text from, and exports to, the mainstream commercial word processors so that users are not locked into a nonstandard technology. It is presented here as an example of the increased functionality that may be made available through a digital journal, supporting many of the current roles and activities involved in journal creation and use while deviating minimally from current journal and word‐processing practice.

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