These links point either to the full-text of the cited source or to the abstract of the citation held in a database. The project is working with publishers in the fields of biology, cognitive science and computer science to apply this approach and explore how links can be used to make explicit other relations between works, and to take users directly to non-journal resources, to gene sequence and protein sequence databases in the biology example. The essence of an Open Journal is to make resources available not as isolated materials but as cooperating assets within an information delivery environment. In addition the project is exploring the impact of collections of links, or linkbases, on publishing. In a rich link environment the critical need is for quality links.
Links are a means to offer access to selected works, which is what journals do now.
One scenario in this analysis is that the published 'journal' will become a set of links.