Open Access and Semantic Web. SW Applications for Open Publishing

The Open Access movement, grown since the first Nineties and quickly developed in the last years, aims at enlarging the dissemination of scientific knowledge; based on the assumption that the Internet and the World Wide Web are able to offer "the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access", the signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access (2003) pledged themselves to make the future Web sustainable, interactive, and transparent through the use of openly accessible compatible content and software tools. It is a well-known fact that one of the major applications of Semantic Web, the Dublin Core metadata set, is devoted to the connection of the scientific knowledge in a unique global network. Thanks to the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH), this goal has yet become possible. Nevertheless, despite these developments are able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance, nowadays the application of Web Semantic technology is limited to archiving and cataloguing; and the main issue of Semantic Web, selection by quality criteria, is lacking in application. This paper describes a set of applications conceived in order to fill the gap; HyperJournal, in particular, is a web application that facilitates the administration of academic journals on the Web; it is based on four major features that will be further described, and on the idea of a shared linkbase through a P2P technology, developed at the Università Politecnica delle Marche.