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Network Facilities in Support of Research Journals

Ronald F. Boisvert, ACMD

I have been involved in several experiments in using electronic networks to support the access to and management of journals. These have focused on the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) for which I serve as Editor-in-Chief. In particular, we have developed a World Wide Web service for TOMS which provides a variety of information about the journal such as

Editorial Charter
Editorial Board
How to Access Articles
Information for Authors
Referee Instructions
Titles to Appear in Future Issues
Table of Contents of All Back Issues

The tables of contents include cross-references to Remarks and Corrigenda, as well as direct hypertext links to corresponding ACM Algorithms maintained in the Netlib repository. The Table of Contents are generated from a BibTeX bibliographic database originally compiled by Nelson Bebee of the University of Utah and now updated regularly as part of this project. The database includes author, title, cross-references, keywords, Computing Reviews classification codes and abstracts (although the latter three items are not yet complete). The TOMS WWW service includes a free-text search facility for this database.

ACM is making a concerted effort to increase network services for its members and to incorporate electronic publishing facilities into its journal operations. The TOMS WWW pages were praised by Bernard Rous, ACM Associate Director of Publications, and Peter Denning, Chair of the ACM Publications Board, for their ``clean organization and wealth of rich links''. They are now being used as a model for the development of WWW pages for other ACM journals.

We have also been involved in planning efforts to develop an online Collected Algorithms of the ACM.