ABSTRACT
SUMMARY. This article is an introduction to electronic journals in the academic law library and to the questions librarians face and must respond to as they provide timely access to legal scholarship in an increasingly electronic environment. Such factors as licensing, use statistics, reference linking, user education, and the preservation of digital formats are considered. Although law reviews are the main form of scholarly communication in law and are comparatively inexpensive, law faculty and students look beyond traditional law journals in their research, and law librarians buy journals beyond student-edited law reviews. The author considers how spiraling subscription costs and changing publication patterns in other disciplines have led to a “serials crisis,” and how that “serials crisis” has led to a “scholarly communication crisis.” In addition, new technology allows the rapid dissemination of information and in some disciplines has led to changes in electronic publishing, such as articles with navigational features, and to alternatives to the traditional journal format, such as preprint servers. She goes 190on to ask if the scholarly communication crisis and the responses to it in other disciplines have implications for legal scholarship and for the future of journals in the academic law library. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <getinfo@haworthpressinc.com> Website: < https://www.HaworthPress.com > © 2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
