Re: An Electronic Journal?

[peterr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Rauch)]

Paleonetters interested in the ins-and-outs of electronic publishing
issues might like to read the April 1995 issue of the Communications
of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

This issue is dedicated to the topic of Digital Libraries and
Electronic Publishing, and includes a section on the ACM's own
Electronic Publishing Plan.

To quote a tiny section of the Plan, under "The Scientific Publishing
Tradition" section, "The scientific publishing tradition is a collection
of practices and assumptions that have become part of the values and
common sense of science. A central tenet of this tradition is
publication only after careful and deliberate review by experts. ...
Another tenet is that every published paper is a permanent member of
the library of all scientific literature."

While it is easy to set up badly designed electronic publishing
projects, there a many publishing issues critical to science which
should be addressed first.  That makes the efforts much less easy. Some
of these considerations are highlighed in the April Comm. of the ACM.
Peter