Abstract

Electronic journals today typically serve as on-line counterparts of their paper based versions, providing abstracts, manuscript tracking, and announcements of forthcoming issues (see Denning 1995; Jog 1995). Some e-journals and magazines also provide “live” materials such as audio/video clips, basic World Wide Web interactivity, or even customization of content and presentation. However, a majority of these ventures seek to use the Internet and the Web as an efficient medium of content distribution and presentation. It thus appears that the broadcast model of television (O’Reilly 1996) has been most widely adopted by the creators of e-journals (Chellappa, Barua and Whinston 1996a). However, the global scope of the Internet and the open nature of its applications enable us to rethink the publishing process itself and to redesign the way content is created (i.e., authored, reviewed, validated, and published). In other words, publishing electronically (making content available on-line without changing processes that support content creation) is not the same as electronic publishing, which seeks to redesign the processes themselves. True electronic publishing can lead not only to improved knowledge dissemination, but can also help create new knowledge through successive refinement and longitudinal argument-based interactions between authors, readers, and other experts.

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