April 24, 2006
Not really. I took a peek at a variety of online academic journals, and their designs were all over the map.
If you don't already have it, “The Design of Sites” by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong seems to be the main book (possibly the only book) everyone cites when it comes to design patterns for different genres. UW Libraries have two copies, however, after perusing the TOC it does not appear to have any information related specifically to academic online journals.The Usability.gov has some info on general usability when designing a website, but it doesn’t focus on academic journals: http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html.
The Yahoo! Design library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php) describes a design pattern as an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context. However, rather than describing how an overall genre/domain should appear, which is what you are looking for, they focus on smaller pieces like breadcrumbs, drag and drop menus, how ratings and reviews can look, etc. It’s good, but it’s granular, and not focused on online academic journals specifically.
This a bit of an anecdotal and amusing stretch, but according to this blogger, The Secret Lives of Fonts (http://www.aspiramedia.com/fadtastic/?p=79), academics prefer reading in either Times New Roman or Georgia fonts, with highest marks going to the Georgia font.
An article written about universal accessibility and online journals by four people at Arizona State University.
If there were a design genre for academic online journals, it would probably be on this HCI Index website, under the Patterns heading.
Abstract: Ability to navigate an information space may be influenced by the presence or absence of certain embedded cues that users have learned to recognize. Experimental results are presented which indicate that experienced readers of certain academic journals are more capable than inexperienced readers in locating themselves in an information space in the absence of explicit structural cues.