On the basis of the original paper and an extended discussion at their 10 Dec 1996 meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, the Publication Council unanimously proposed that ESA offer electronic reprints to authors of articles in its journals. ESA's Governing Board subsequently voted to approve the offering of e-reprints and specified that their price be commensurate with the price of paper reprints. In a teleconference on 4 June 1997, ESA's Electronic Publication Implementation Committee unanimously reaffirmed their support of ESA offering its authors concurrent e-reprints.
Electronic reprints make traditionally published articles accessible on the Internet.
In both cases they are posted as PDF files, thereby retaining the appearance and pagination of the printed article. The page-layout files are simply printed to PDF files using Adobe Acrobat software. If page-layout files are not available, PDF files may be made from the assembled scanned images of the printed pages. Those who want to read an article can view it with almost no delay. Those who want a paper copy of an article can print one or more and as often as needed.