Refereed Electronic Journals and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Electronic publishing, formerly an idea whose elegant utility one could only admire in the abstract, has in recent years become possible. Several electronic journals are now published regularly, in science, business management, the humanities, and the social sciences. In this essay we describe the current state of electronic publishing in the humanities and outline the possibilities it offers for the academy. The promises of this medium challenge librarians in particular to take an active role in the field by encouraging new electronic publications and by developing procedures and norms for handling these publications. Humanists and librarians must familiarize themselves with the electronic-mail environment and train themselves to use it, because this technology seems certain to become a standard academic and intellectual tool in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio