Regular journals are fast becoming obsolete. In a rapidly changing field like mobile computing, a turnover time of one year or more is totally unacceptable. Consequently, regular journals are losing significance. The only reason to submit a paper to a journal is to be able to add the publication to the c.v, and not to disseminate information. In fact, fewer and fewer people are reading journals since usually they have quicker electronic access to the paper through ftp etc. New ideas which exploit current technology are needed. Here is one which we would like to try out.
We propose creating an Interactive Journal of Mobile Computing to provide timely dissemination of results in this new and rapidly expanding research area. We have set it up as WWW server, with a list of pointers to new papers in this area. The papers will be NOT BE FORMALLY REVIEWED but each submission will have a "comments box" which will contain correspondence and critical comments about the paper by electronic readers. The comments box can be made public or be kept private for the author. The determination of relevance of the paper to the field will need to be made by the Journal Keepers before "publishing" it in the journal. The journal will not store the papers locally but only provide links to the sites where authors store the papers. It is up to the author whether s/he intends to keep the link to the paper after it is published in a regular journal. However, even in such a case, the text of the paper could be replaced with a reference to that regular journal, leaving an abstract and a comment box still linked to the Mobidata Journal. Therefore, typically, the paper's text will be included in the journal until the paper is published in a regular journal and then the author(s) can decide whether to keep the paper in the Mobidata Journal (analogous to providing access to published papers via anonymous ftp) or just leave the reference/comment box.
The journal will be organized into regular volumes just as regular journals so one can refer to it in publications. We are also planning to provide browsing tools based on subject etc.
This is an experiment. We plan to start with some of our own papers and some of the papers presented in the Mobidata workshop.
Hopefully, the journal will be helpful for researchers in the field who will not have to search through individual home pages.
Additionally, we would like to have a INDUSTRY track which will publish news briefs in rapidly changing PCS industry, system and testbed descriptions.
The URL of the Mobidata Journal is is
http://rags.rutgers.edu/journal/cover.htmlThe submission procedure is described there together with the proper submission form which is available through Mosaic as well.
After determination that the paper is indeed relevant, we provide LINKs to the author's paper. We will NOT store the copy of the original paper at our site. In this way the papers can "evolve" if the authors add new material.