Journal Concept
I. Statement of Purpose
Living Reviews in Relativity is a solely WWW-based, peer reviewed journal, publishing as the name suggests, reviews of research in all areas of relativity. The journal is offered as a free service to the scientific community. Articles are solicited from specialists in their fields and are directed toward physicists at the graduate student level and beyond. Articles appearing in Living Reviews provide current and insightful overviews of what's happening in the fields they cover as well as annotated insights (and where possible, active links) into the key literature and online resources pertaining to these fields. One of the most important features of Living Reviews is that its articles are kept up to date by their authors. This is the significance of the word "Living" in the journal's title.
With high quality, easily navigable, current editorial content, and with meaningful indexing of print and electronic resources, Living Reviews will develop into an information system researchers can use to follow and to learn more about the status of investigations in relativity. Living Reviews intends to become one of the first places a scientist looks for information about work in the fields covered by the journal. Recognizing that many respectable electronic efforts are already in progress, Living Reviews complements, rather than replicates, existing WWW physics resources. Living Reviews achieves this by providing refereed, expertly written articles which frame and link the resources that are most valuable in understanding current relativity research.
II. Facts about Publication
The journal is organized into yearly volumes. Articles appear throughout the year, as they are ready for publication. The journal carries no page charges for authors and no subscription fees for users. Current plans are to ensure that Living Reviews remains a freely available publication throughout its existence.
The journal is not distributed on paper in the traditional way. In general, users access and employ Living Reviews on its home website or on mirror sites. Individual articles can be downloaded in a format suitable for printing or in a self-contained set of HTML pages for off-line reading.
As a free service, we maintain a subscription list. This mailing list will be used to notify journal users when a new article has been published, providing the article's abstract. In addition, information about general changes and other matters pertaining to Living Reviews is emailed to subscribers. Users will not need to subscribe to the Living Reviews mailing list in order to view the articles in the journal; joining the list, however, will be a convenient way for users to keep informed about what's happening in Living Reviews.
To ensure convenient, worldwide access to Living Reviews, the journal is mirrored, using mirrors by courtesy of the European Mathematical Society's European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS). Because of this, materials local to the journal will be kept in a self-contained directory tree on a single WWW server. Mirror sites are being updated according to each provider's procedures.
III. The Electronic Design of Living Reviews: Users and Utility
One of the main features of Living Reviews is the provision of a hypertext viewing environment. With a print document, a viewer tends to read an author's ideas in a preordained manner. With a hypertext document, a viewer navigates information by following links on an "as-needed" or an "as-desired" basis. Thus, the path one follows through a hypertext document can result in an individual experience: self-selected and thus self-directed. Given this dynamic quality of hypertext, we expect Living Reviews to be used rather than just read. The awareness that we have users, not just readers, is a major principle guiding the design of Living Reviews.
A user working with electronic documents needs information to be presented in a way that is easy to assimilate from a computer screen. Most users access Living Reviews from their working environment, with all its interruptions and distractions. They often suspend their own reading of an article to follow up a link to an on-line resource, to another section of the article, to a reference, or to an index. These jumps may lead to further links. Such a style of use puts certain requirements on the journal's presentation and content. Deep and complex arguments, detailed proofs of theorems, and long mathematical derivations are probably better communicated on paper. Living Reviews is, therefore, not a textbook or a monograph. Rather, it offers surveys of recent work, evaluations of the importance and interconnections of results, summaries of important results, entry points into the essential literature, assessments of where new progress is needed, access to web sites and other useful electronic contacts, and databases of the recent literature.
Living Reviews users are expected to be drawn from the entire relativity community. Graduate students can use the journal to start their initial literature surveys or to learn about fields peripheral to their own; researchers can use it to quickly find out about the most up-to-date results in fields in which they are not current, to track down bibliographic references that they have not recorded, or even to find areas in which their own skills can be applied in a new field; and lecturers can use it to find information and visual materials that can be used in presentations at all levels.
Living Reviews is designed to introduce all such users to research in a field in an effective, efficient and flexible way. Its editorial policy ensures that all articles and supporting materials offered through the journal have these qualities. Its editorial efforts aim to help its authors provide succinct, lucid discussions that are easily digestible on a computer screen. By providing articles that are comprehensible and yet rich in content, and by providing carefully integrated links both to other Living Reviews documents and to electronic media elsewhere (preprint archives, databases, movies, web sites), the journal provides its users with opportunities to choose from the widest possible range of sources, in order to meet their specific needs.
To assist this, all articles appearing in Living Reviews, and all references appearing in those articles, are collated into a subject-indexed resource list. This resource list is a hypertext document incorporating, where possible, active links to the materials it indexes. Through this, Living Reviews provides a comprehensive way for its users to become aware of and, where possible, to directly access the most important research in the field, even without going through any specific review article. Because all the citations in Living Reviews have been selected by leading specialists, those using the journal in this way can be assured that the references they find are worth considering.
IV. Living Reviews: Always Up-to-date
The key feature of Living Reviews is the concept of a living article. This means that we will take advantage of the ease of editing electronic material to keep articles as up-to-date as we can.
Because Living Reviews offers immediate online access to all its articles and to any online materials cited in those articles, it recognizes that it is essential that all articles and all links stay current. Living Reviews will stay current in the following ways.
First, and most importantly, authors will revise articles as important new research developments occur. We encourage our authors to submit annual updates of their reviews, which will be marked by a version number added to the orginal article's publication number. Every second or third year these updates should lead into a major revision of the article, which is considered a new publication. As such it is again subject to refereeing and will be published with a new publication number. Errata are added directly to the original review and marked throughout the article. All links to online resources made in articles and in the journal at large will be actively maintained. They will be checked frequently and updated as needed.
Finally, Living Reviews is always evolving; we are always looking for ways to increase its usefulness. These ways of keeping current make the journal a "Living" resource.
V. Editorial Policy and Journal Content
Living Reviews publishes reviews in all areas of relativity. The editors solicit articles from leading experts, with a view to achieving uniform coverage of modern relativity research. All submitted articles are reviewed and edited carefully, with attention paid to content, organization, and style as they relate to the aims of Living Reviews.
The coverage and depth of an article should be at a level similar to that found in a plenary review talk at a major conference. That is, an author specializing in a given area informs advanced scientists from other areas about the latest significant research in his or her area of specialization. Although articles may explain difficult concepts and provide an overall framework for understanding work in a field, they will not be primarily tutorial in nature. Rather than methodically covering every aspect of a given research area, an article published in Living Reviews highlights significant issues affecting the field, provides thoughtful and evaluative commentary on the essential techniques and concepts being used in current research, and offers insight into the challenges facing future research efforts. Through their commentary, and, where appropriate, by offering direct annotation, authors guide users to the most useful, reliable, and interesting references.
Normally, articles survey relatively narrow areas of research. This makes the job of writing and maintaining them more tractable for authors. It also keeps articles more concise, a characteristic that makes them more usable in a hypertext environment. By including and cross-linking many articles on specific subjects, the journal as a whole pursues comprehensive coverage of relativity. Where appropriate, Living Reviews also includes broader review articles to bridge gaps or to make meaningful connections among more specific subjects.
As mentioned above, articles in Living Reviews are revised as new research developments occur. In this way, users can be confident of finding the latest important work in Living Reviews. Substantial article updates are treated editorially as new articles, with full referee scrutiny. These are assigned a new publication number and replace their older versions in the author- and subject-organized article listings. Article updates appear in the journal as soon as they are accepted. For archival purposes, the previous version of the article is still listed in the original volume in which it was published, and it remains accessible from the article's history page. In addition, authors may also request the publication of errata or small, important additions of new information within the original article. All such changes are carefully documented in the online and print versions of the article, and recorded on the article's history page.
VI. Technical Matters
The journal's main goal is to develop a strong base of well organized, effectively navigable scientific content. For the foreseeable future, the journal will rely most heavily on tested features of the WWW while occasionally branching out, as the needs of authors and users evolve, into the latest web technologies.
Authors must submit their articles in LaTeX. Using our software built on top of Eitan Gurari's TeX4ht converter, we convert LaTeX documents to valid HTML; authors are not responsible for HTML code in their documents. This is the responsibility of Living Reviews.