Professional Electronic Publishing in Hyper - G 1 The Next Generation Publishing Solution on the

The rst part of the paper identiies disadvantages of rst generation Web publishing solutions that have to be overcome for professional publication providers. Using Hyper-G for distribution of electronic documents opens the way to the rst fully-integrated professional publishing solution on the Web. User and group access rights as well as billing mechanisms are integrated into the server, links are bidirectional and annotations to existing documents are possible without changing the contents of documents themselves. Hyperlinks are supported in arbitrary document types besides hypertext which opens the way to new publishing paradigms beyond the paper-based approach. Naturally, a rich set of structure and search mechanisms is provided. On this basis, a set of tools has been developed that almost fully automatically supports electronic refereeing, automatic hyperlink creation, glossary links and table of contents generation. All the data prepared on a Hyper-G server can then be simply exported to CD-ROM, allowing hybrid Web/CD-ROM publications to be created without any additional eeort. Electronic publishing is today one of the booming branches on the Web. Web surfers will nd lots of electronic paperware on their ride through the servers. However, most of the Web sites that serve electronic publications are run by universities and only a few are operated by publishing companies on an evaluation basis free of charge. Having a closer look at the way electronic publishing is done today, one will mostly nd HTML or PDF documents that are very similar to their paper-based counterparts. Often a search engine is provided to make location of interesting papers easier, but other beneets of publishing electronically are mostly neglected. For the reader of electronic publications, nearly no value is added compared to paper-based articles. Worse than that-considering HTML documents-the possibility of making high quality printouts for archival purposes is lost. This is surely not enough to make electronic publishing on the Web a success. Distributing electronic documents on the Web is considered to be cheaper than publishing on paper see Odlyzko 95], additionally turnaround time from submission of an article to the nal published version is considered to be sig-niicantly shorter than for paper-based publications. As experience with J.UCS see Section 5] shows, this is certainly not true for high quality publications that