HyperJournal overview (PDF):

• Italian version
• French version
• English version
• Spanish version.
• German version.

Short Overwiew

HyperJournal is a software application that facilitates the administration of academic journals on the Web. Conceived for researchers in the Humanities and designed according to an intuitive and elegant layout, it permits the installation, personalization, and administration of a dedicated Web site at extremely low cost and without the need for special IT-competence. HyperJournal can be used not only to establish an online version of an existing paper periodical, but also to create an entirely new, solely electronic journal. In comparison with existing software applications, HyperJournal introduces three major innovations:

1. Dynamic contextualization automatically transforms cross-references contained in journal articles into hypertextual, bidirectional links. When the reader views an article published in HyperJournal, a contextualization bar provides immediate access to a) all the articles the author has cited, and b) all the articles that cite the article currently being viewed.
2. The HyperJournal Network. Dynamic contextualization is not limited to one journal only: it connects all the journals that use the HyperJournal software in a distributed, semantically structured and scalable peer-to-peer network. Compatibility with the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative ensures maximal interoperability between the HyperJournal Network and other electronic publications. The HyperJournal Network thereby creates a space in which knowledge is freely shared and readily accessible. Rather than using mere keyword searching or importing artificial conceptual tables to organize this space, HyperJournal transposes the time-honored system of scholarly citation into an electronic environment.
3. HyperJournals versus “core journals”. By clicking on an author’s name, the HyperJournal system automatically searches the entire HyperJournal network and produces a citation list that includes all the articles written by the author, all the articles the author has cited, and all the articles that cite the author. Comprehensive bibliometric lists can thereby be composed without the need to rely on the manual consultation of a small set of “core journals,” often exclusively in English. In this system, by contrast, it will be the actual give-and-take of academic discourse, registered automatically on the network through citations, which will point out the importance of a journal (even of small niche journals written in so-called minor languages) and establish the reputation of scholars. In addition, through the use of (semantic web) RDF describers, bibliometric lists can be constructed in a way to distinguish, for example, between positive and negative citations.