ABSTRACT
Nine years ago a radically different world of scholarly communication was proposed on the back page of the Chronicle of Higher Education! suggesting a way to transform scholarly communication through the medium of electronic publishing. By implication, the article predicted the end of scholarly journals in the form they currently existed. They would be replaced by a networked scholarly communication system developed and controlled by institutions of higher education and scholarly associations. The hypothesized system encompassed all elements of scholarly production: preprints, informal intellectual comment and exchange, peer reviewing, citation monitoring, formal publication, indexing and abstracting, and archiving. The system sought to combine the strengths of on-line publishing (speed, wide distribution, interactivity) with the strengths of traditional scholarly publishing (blind peer reviews, selectivity, indexing and archiving). The new system envisioned would assist libraries in meeting the soaring costs of journal subscriptions, the constant demand for additional space, and the high cost of maintaining paper journal collections. An important aspect of the proposal was the role of universities, which, by gaining control of the scholarly publication process, would also gain control over the mechanism that dominates the faculty reward system.
