Secondly, IOPP has a responsibility to continue supporting the learned and educational activities of the Institute, in the UK and elsewhere, financially. Finally, IOPP as a learned society publisher must move with the needs of the scientific community and play its part in an orderly transition to new modes of communication, if that is indeed what is about to happen. We decided on World Wide Web as the vehicle for delivery because of its functionality and increasing popularity. We have chosen HTML for interface and headers, but concluded that the current version was not sufficiently flexible for our highly mathematical material. We therefore shall offer Acrobat PDF and Postscript for full text, maths and figures.
Pricing is a critical area.
We have already invested heavily in electronic journal development and expect to continue doing so. Much of this investment is in staff, for mounting more than 60,000 pages of articles a year in attractive and searchable form, and with the attendant registration and support services. We hope that our investment can be recouped by reducing a little the cancellations that we have all seen over the years. In implementing this approach, we shall have to work very closely with the libraries. Further details of the electronic journals programme, and particularly the registration and access arrangements, will be announced there over the next few months.