Masthead - Full issue pdf

lishing and costs of electronic publishing must be conducted with great care. King stressed the need for a careful definition of terms, while the others emphasized that many costs (for example, those for peer review) do not disappear in the electronic publishing system and that there is no reason to believe, as some have suggested, that electronic publication is inherently less costly than paper publishing. Indeed, many enhancements in the electronic system-for example hot-linking and graphics display improvements-actually increase cost, they stressed. William Mischo (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) described some of the technical difficulties inherent in archiving electronic journals, including the still substantial cost of archival storage, despite large decreases in storage device costs in recent years. He also raised the disturbing issue of the questionable readability in future years of outmoded storage vehicles such as 5-inch floppy disks and current-technology CD-ROMs. Bernard Donovan (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, UK) had surveyed a number of publishers and concluded that substantial costs were incurred by scientific publishers in their conduct of peer review. He estimated such costs as typically between 100-300 GBP per accepted paper. Fytton Rowland (University of Loughborough, UK) challenged the assertion that users would find electronic publications so accessible and easy to use as to render librarians redundant. Indeed, he contended that the librarian and information intermediary functions will continue to be needed as never before, to cope with the variety and rather chaotic arrangement of materials on the Internet. Gary VandenBos and Susan Knapp (American Psychological Association) described a new all-electronic journal published by the APA; this journal has 2500 individual users, currently accessing it for no charge. However, there had been, and continued to be some resistance from potential authors and more resistance than expected from reviewers. Knapp also described an innovative pricing arrangement (still experimental) under which APA members with a print subscription to at least one APA journal could purchase in addition, at a very attractive price, access to a full-text database of all APA journals and/or to the Psychological Abstracts database. Knud Thomsen, a participant in a working group of scientists at fusion energy facilities scattered over many parts of the world, described the characteristics and problems of their system for mutual communication over the Internet. Many of these problems-for example, use of incompatible software versions and different e-mail systems-are extremely