Four titans of the industry took a glimpse at the near-term future. They resonated the importance of customer needs, cooperation with business partners, and thinking outside the box.
Electronic media is instant, cheap, personal, interactive, and responsive.
Given that, it is obvious that scholarly publishing is definitely not there yet. Although many publications are up on a Web site the day of publication, and some journals are putting up a small amount of content prepublication, the process is far from instant, because it is largely based on print technology adapted for the online. Nor is it cheap. Data conversion is in fact a very expensive activity. MyYahoo, E-alerts, systems remembering what you did the last time and offering more or better the next time.