Publications, long a major component of the knowledge dissemination process, will become increasingly less important as people learn from doing rather than reading and as information becomes more and more dynamic. In essence, producing byproduct publications can hinder rather than facilitate the scholarly process. New electronic infrastructure will provide new means to demonstrate that new knowledge has been created. But we must first learn how. Such roles must be carefully accounted for if we are to devise electronic alternatives.
Journals are first of all repositories of past scholarship.
The volume and issue numbers affixed to scholarly journals, used in citations by subsequent works, permit the formation of a network linking knowledge created today with knowledge created yesterday. Currently, the maintenance of journal archives becomes the distributed responsibility of other parties primarily public and private libraries and index services such as The Social Sciences Citation Index. Electronic publishers must either take on that responsibility for themselves or await progress by professional archivists. There will also be interesting debates around the kinds of errors that can be corrected, new versions released, etc. Contributions to special 'issues' could be special 'research lines' released over a string of months or even years.