Editorial: Citation-Linking between Open Access Journals

Open access (OA) journals fill a gap in the literature by establishing an online forum for discussion of empirical, theoretical and practical aspects, and policies related to their field. They facilitate scholarly communication between researchers who are investigating and working towards possible solutions. OA journals offer many advantages that scholarly print journals cannot match. One of the main advantages is the capability of reference-hyperlinking, which allows readers to jump directly and easily from reference-links to cited references (e.g., journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, patents and web resources). A reference-link (also called citation-link) is a hyperlinked reference located at the end of a scientific article, which usually contains all the bibliographic information needed to identify, retrieve and evaluate the cited document. Reference-linking is a natural application of the hypertext links on scholarly OA journals, providing direct connections between two OA journals or articles. Reference-links in OA journals allow readers to directly access and browse the full-text of the cited references by simply clicking on the hypertext links.