The Journal of Electronic Publishing is an online journal published by the Michigan University Press.
Publisher’s note
Electronic publishing is changing the world we live in. It is changing what publishers do. It is changing the way scientists, business people, and students — all of us — work.
In this environment of change and uncertainty, the publisher faces many challenges: details such as Web design, server management, pricing (and collecting the revenue!) as well as the big policy questions.
The Journal of Electronic Publishing is for the thoughtful forward-thinking publisher, librarian, scholar, or author — in fact, anyone in this new business — facing those challenges. We aim to range widely in our coverage, but the emphasis will be on the broader issues that should shape policy, and on professional, scientific or academic publishing, both books and journals.
JEP faces the same problems as any electronic publication, and we intend to make a virtue of that by using the Journal as a testbed to try ideas and to show to you, our readers, what happens when we do. We hope for successes, of course, but we will report on our failures, too.
One experiment is that we are neither quite a magazine nor a journal. We are both. The core of each issue is a set of short invited contributions from expert and experienced practitioners on a particular theme. That is more like a magazine. We also seek out and encourage longer pieces from publishers and from scholars and others who are thinking interestingly about electronic publishing. That is the journal. And from time to time we are adding regular columns.
