Open Source Software for E-Journals

The recent post in DigitalKoans features three open source, low-cost systems for publishing e-journals: Hyperjournal, Simon Fraser’s Open Journal System, and DPubS, soon to be released by Cornell. With a system such as these you can receive, review, edit and publish submissions in a format that is professionally respectable with little knowledge of IT.

It’s unlikely — though not impossible — that law firms would wish to publish journals (it may be a better format for some writings that firms put out than blogs or ordinary websites, however); but such a system might prove useful if bent a bit as a means of gathering and presenting in-house memoranda or research pieces within the firm. The technical features of these systems could also be beneficial in organizing and inter-relating documents. For instance, Hyperjournal’s “dynamic contextualization“:

Dynamic Contextualization is a P2P tool, based on semantic web technologies, which allows readers to visualize, while reading an article, all the articles quoted by and all those quoting the one they are reading. Dynamic Contextualization also enables you to easily carry out bibliometrical calculations such as: the number of quotations received by an article or by an author, citation source groupings by journal, by topic, by period.