Book Description

Explore the future of Internet-based Science Journals! Electronic Expectations: Science Journals on the Web chronicles the convergence of financial, technical, and public policy considerations that turned what seemed like science fiction twenty years ago into a library fact of life today. The book shows that while electronic publication greatly speeds issuance of important scientific results of enduring value, it also has the potential to lower the economic threshold at which crank papers and marginal publications can gain a wide, if sadly misled audience, in the short run. In Electronic Expectations, editor Tony Stankus predicts with splendid irony that the electronic journals that will matter the most to genuine scientific progress will be the web versions of long-standing leaders among traditional print journals, whose electronic typesetting requirements gave the web its first format conventions and rules for safe content transmission. Electronic Expectations will empower you to: assess the existing print journal system and its prospects for improvement through electronic publishing discern the competing motivations and strategies of science researchers, librarians, publishers and journal aggregators in going electronic identify the web winners and losers after these first ten years understand the underlying business and technological warfare affecting the larger future of the internet Electronic Expectations demonstrates that while scientists invented the web, they no longer control it, and that even the very largest research organizations, libraries, publishers, and journal aggregators, will, to a substantial degree, be at the technological and economic mercy of commercial users of the web.