This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. If you have any questions about permissions, please contact Rob Kling. Some scholars argue that electronic publication is much more likely to facilitate communication in the scholarly communities because it can speed up communication and is costs appear to be much lower. Scholars like Harnad and Stodolsky are on the leading edge of articulating new possibilities for scholarly communications. E-journals, one format for scholarly communications, are very likely to grow in significance, and are the subject of serious official investigations by several scientific societies including the American Physical Society, the American Mathematical Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the British Sociological Association.
Scholars vary considerably in their positions about e-journals.
In a few field, such as Information Systems and Information Science, the discussion of electronic publishing has a relatively high profile. But today, most scholars in most fields go about their daily rounds without the thought of electronic publication seriously crossing their minds. But some scholars who are quite familiar with e-journals are also cautious in wholeheartedly supporting them as media of scholarly communication. We also pay special attention to the ways that the scholarly communication system depends upon indices and abstracts systems, maintained in libraries of some form, as well collections of primary materials. We argue that the most successful electronic journals, in the near term, will need special architectures.