The AAS has a dual role in proceeding with an electronic publishing effort. The first is to ensure quality through rigorous peer review to validate the science and copy-editing to ensure clarity of expression. In the sea of unrefereed manuscripts, conference proceedings and internal publications, we see the journals as a repository of high quality science. The second role is to ensure that the astronomical community continues to have inexpensive and easy access to the research results published in the journals. Plan the Approach.
Publishing has many facets, and all have to be addressed.
The heart of an electronic publishing system is the database of manuscripts to which sufficient logical markup has been added so that different types of output can be obtained from the same database. For instance, from a manuscript database, we need to produce output which is suitable for display on a screen, a file which can drive the printer at a local workstation and a file suitable to drive the typesetting software to produce the traditional, bound paper copy of the journal. Further, all of these steps have to be done in a demanding production environment. The ApJ consists of more than 20,000 pages per year. Put another way, the process must produce 100 new pages every working day.