Introduction

This volume is devoted to a series of tutorial reviews of the literature broadly relating to the rise of electronic journals in the sciences. Science & Technology Libraries has already begun some valuable bibliographic updates on electronic journals from Suzanne T. Weiner, Editor for Electronic Resources in Science and Technology, for this journal. This work is, in no way, a replacement for her four-part series focused aimed at keeping our regular target audience, professional science librarians, up to date, a task that will be necessary for years to come. Rather, the reviews in this volume are intended for all the segments involved in e-journals: science librarians, scientific authors, publishers, aggregators, and Internet managers. While some of the material in each review might seem too elementary for one or two segments of this larger audience, it is likely that it will fill in the gaps of knowledge of another. It is hoped that this work will be particularly beneficial to science librarians in training, most of whom continue to be drawn from the ranks of humanities and social studies backgrounds, and are therefore likely to be unaware of even some of the major issues in this newest version of an old battle over allocation of library resources by disciplines. These reviews were based on some traditional literature searching techniques, a good deal of web surfing, and a reformulation of the discovered material in the light of two overriding themes that came to the fore early on in this process.