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Copyright (c) 1994 Ann Okerson, [e-mail]
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INTRODUCTION

Purpose and Scope:

What began as very nearly the first "Internet directory" of any kind now
settles into its role as a standard reference work for an
ever-burgeoning field.  This is the fourth year of publication of the
Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion
Lists.  As in the past three years, we offer our readers a snapshot of
the academically created and oriented serials on the Internet.  These
are organized into two sections prepared by two different groups of
cybrarians.  Both groups welcome any additional information and entries
-- and even debate -- that readers are willing to provide.

(1) Journals and Newsletters.  In the journals section the definition of
serials is broadly interpreted, for it includes magazines and zines; and
the newsletters portion includes not only newsletters but also other
hard-to-characterize types of serials such as digests, reference works,
bulletins, and network hybrids.  For the first three editions, Michael
Strangelove of the University of Ottawa was the compiler, but in Spring
1993 he moved full-time into the world of Internet newsletter publishing
and turned over the compilation to ARL staff.  Michael Strangelove
continues to advise and inform the project in a number of ways even as
the work he began passed to Lisabeth King, a Research Assistant at the
ARL Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing and a graduate student
at the Catholic University of America.

In the current edition, the number of titles has almost doubled over the
past year and quadrupled since the first edition of 1991 (110 entries in
1991, 240 in 1993, and over 440 this year), and, as the acknowledgments
make clear, many people contribute information and assistance to the
project.  The Journals and Newsletters section aims to be as
comprehensive as possible, including every title that the compiler(s)
can locate, and the entries represent all information that was received
and verified up through the end of April 1994.  The entries originate
from a number of sources:

% In August 1993, ARL's OSAP began an announcement list for new
electronic journals and newsletters on the Internet.  This list
currently has over 1,000 subscribers, who are encouraged to post a
message whenever they hear of a new title that is either being planned
or newly released.  The moderator (Ann Okerson) scans many Internet
postings and forwards appropriate ones.  The list is supported by the
American Mathematical Society's electronic publishing group headed by
David Rodgers.  (To subscribe or contribute, e-mail to:
[e-mail], leave the subject line blank, and in the the
body of the message type: subscribe NewJour-L yourfirstname
yourlastname.)

% Lisabeth King and Dru Mogge, ARL's Electronic Services Coordinator,
regularly browse ftp and gopher sites where journals are maintained or
added and investigate newcomers.

% Certain e-mail publications are a particularly good source of
newsnotes about new journals and newsletters.  Invaluable to us has been
Ken Law's Computists' Communique (listed herein), a weekly newsletter
that often provides information on new publications both in print and
electronic form.  VPIEJ-L is a site where announcements are to be found,
as are New-List, PACS-L, and E-D-U-P-A-G-E.

(2) Academic Discussion Lists.  The scope of this section is electronic
conferences, bulletin boards, and discussions of an academic nature that
are found on Bitnet, Internet, and various other linked networks.  A
team headed for the fourth year in a row by Diane Kovacs of the Kent
State University Libraries, comprising several of her colleagues from
that institution, uses its judgment in deciding what topics are of
primary interest to scholars, researchers, and students.  Last year for
the first time, the UK Mailbase e-conferences were added.  With this
edition, a number of the leading Usenet groups make their debut.

Since 1991 these listings have increased in size by 3.5 times, from 517
originally to nearly 1800.  There is no precise count of the whole
universe of electronic discussions, groups, conferences, and bulletin
boards, though numbers such as 12,000 or 15,000 or more are frequently
advanced.  Therefore the Kovacs/Kent State team provides a particularly
valuable service in culling that universe for the titles herein.  The
other service they offer is in making the information available on the
Internet for free to all users through the facilities of Kent State
University.  This printed book is derived from those files, with
re-formatting and editing added.  The directions for access to the
networked versions are given in Diane Kovacs' introduction at the start
of the Lists section.


Enhancements:

Every year, we seek to provide readers with additional features that
help to describe the electronic serials landscape or to facilitate
navigation through it.  For the third year, we have hunted for the best
theoretical or conceptual, visionary article written in the journal or
book literature on the topic of electronic publishing.  This year,
Geoffrey Nunberg's view of the "Places of Books" won our informal office
competition and is reproduced as the lead article.  Nunberg's work joins
previously selected, excellent and lustrous essays by Stevan Harnad
(1992), "The Post-Gutenberg Galaxy," and James O'Donnell (1993), "St.
Augustine to NREN." A shorter but equally interesting work about
categorizing electronic serials was written especially for the Directory
by Jean-Claude Guedon.  He reassures us that when we attempt to
categorize serials on the Internet we are understandably confused and
explains how we may begin to move our thinking into a different context.

Birdie MacLennan, herself a long-time cybersurfer and creator/moderator
of a number of innovative electronic fora in serials librarianship,
undertook to analyze a new genre of library service.  She offers a
review article about serials collections on the Internet.  While an
important piece in telling readers where they may find sites for
e-serials and what they will see there, it is all the more useful for
the message that lurks throughout: the way in which the library
community is starting to archive and make e-serials available is to be
commended but has a long way to go.  A number of issues need to be
resolved to do the job right and they involve establishing standards for
electronic serials collections as well as developing far better search
mechanisms to exploit the full value of the works.  In e-mail she wrote:
"What I found was a number of sites just 'doing their own thing'
independently of each other, often without awareness of what others are
doing or have attempted.  Organization of the collection is not evident
in many of these locations, and often there appears to be a lack of
thought about the traditional library values of access and design."

David Robison again offers an electronic publishing bibliography to
update the one he prepared for the Third Edition, 1993, and Steve
Outings allowed us to reproduce his early listing of newspapers
available on the Internet.  While newspapers are not quite the purview
of this Directory, it is nonetheless of interest to know that they are
being ported to the net in large numbers.


Highlights of the Past Year in Electronic Serials on the Internet:

We call to your attention five developments of the last year that seem
of particular significance for electronic serials:

1.  Continued phenomenal growth rate, in both readers/users of the
Internet and in the publications created on and for it.

According to statistics released by the NSF-NIS-NSFNet on May 3rd, 1994,
a new traffic record was reached as traffic on the NSF backbone grew by
20.7 percent during the month of March.  This is the largest single jump
in the history of the Internet.  At the same time, browsing services
grew remarkably: gopher traffic by 17.6% and http (World Wide Web) by
32.9%.  (To get an idea of the implications of such growth, consider
this: if the network sustained a growth rate of 20% per month, usage
would triple every six months.)

The growth of refereed journals on the Internet has taken a jump in the
past year.  While by no means matching the rates of growth above, the
refereed titles in this Directory have more than doubled in the past
year to some 74 titles.  In passing, note that a favorite title is
"Electronic Journal of ....." When the day comes that "electronic" no
longer needs to be the first word, perhaps e-journals will have come
into their own.

Viewed as an economic phenomenon, this journals growth is both
extraordinary and extraordinarily hopeful.  The figures tell us that in
the real world where "hard choices" must be made, scholars and
scientists are in fact mastering the challenge of providing high quality
scholarly information to a very wide audience at no or virtually no
charge to the end users.  If this economics of information distribution
can be sustained, it would be of enormous importance to academe and the
creaking and overburdened institutional budges that must now pay the
spiraling costs of print information.  If this is a trend, it is a most
welcome one.

Every piece of available evidence, notably the Andrew W.  Mellon
Foundation's University Libraries and Scholarly Communications
(Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, November 1992,
available from ARL; Also Internet URL:
gopher://gopher.lib.virginia.edu:70/11/alpha/mellon), the annual ARL
Statistics, and the various ALA and vendor serial price indexes, portray
an journals publishing system that is pricing itself out of reach of the
academic community.  The system that seems to be emerging on the
Internet offers:

% A wide range of publications on many topics.

% More peer review by qualified editors and boards much as in the
print-on-paper system.

% Wider acceptance of the medium and what it brings, by academics and by
the deans and provosts who evaluate them for promotion and tenure.

% ASCII-based, searchable, downloadable, integratable texts, with few
barriers to access and reading (the biggest one currently is finding the
material, a problem this directory helps remedy).  The most hopeful sign
is that some of the journals are moving to structured text files (e.g.
using SGML), a key development for retrieval and functionality.

% A "new" economic model.  Increasingly, academic creators and readers
recognize that the current print-on-paper scholarly publishing mode is
far from a free market system.  Rather, it is heavily subsidized
throughout the process by the institutions that provide, through their
distinguished academics, the costs of creation and peer review, and
through their budgets enable the purchase of the published materials.
Many reason that when the nature of the market is understood, it becomes
possible to support a number of the costs of publishing Internet
journals "up front," offering affordable access throughout academe.  If
current collaborative trends persist, it will become possible to reduce
the rate of charging to subscribers.  These are often academic
libraries, and for a number of reasons we see institutional payment
(rather than many small charges piecemeal to individual academic
end-users) as continuing to be the best way to assure the future of
scholarly communications.

% An emphasis on rapid and wide communication that reaches beyond the
traditional social, institutional, and geographical boundaries of
scholarly communication to include readers and even authors
unconsciously excluded by the economics and sociology of the "old"
system.

% Very few traditional publishers are active in the arena described
here.  Currently, the principal players are members of academe.  The
"formal" participants so far are a highly limited number of
not-for-profit university presses, a few societies, and the Online
Computer Library Center (OCLC).  The number of formal publishers will,
of course, increase as the volume of Internet publishing grows, but it
is an environment that seems particularly friendly to individual,
university, and society publishing.

2.  Creativity on the Internet.

Everyone is experimenting.  This was not only a year for numerous
e-journal startups from within academe but also a year for other kinds
of electronic distribution -- if one can think of it, it happened on the
Net: working papers, novels, policy papers, collaborative research and
problem solving, societies conducting their committee work.  Traditional
(paper) publishers, for many years a group not associated with leading
edge research and innovation, turned to experiments with their journals
and in some cases books.  Almost every scholarly or scientific publisher
of modest size and higher seems to be working with one or more
institutional customers or collaborators in mounting or planning an
experiment.  There has not been such a fruitfully chaotic time since
possibly the invention or print or at least the origination of the
journal 300 years ago.

The downside of the publishers' experimentation is that the experiments
are limited in critical ways.  The biggest drawback is that, in order to
assure income, print publishers are seeking ways to preserve the paper
image electronically and to sell not text but pictures of text in
bit-mapped images, often through the rapidly-obsolescing CD-ROM delivery
vehicle.  Even if not downright wrong-headed, such efforts fail to take
advantage of the best characteristics of networked communications: speed
of distribution and access facilitated in several ways.  Bit-maps are
elephantine and slow to ship around, a page takes a long time to print,
integration into other works is impossible.  Thus, many of the current
experiments, while offering some value, do not advance the interests of
the user much beyond microfilm, if at all.

This understanding on the part of industry and funders is slow in
coming, but it will come.  Attempts to preserve old-fashioned text
formats and delivery mechanisms go hand-in-hand with attempts to
preserve and even extend the print world's economics based on selling
indstrially-reproduced, multiple copies of physical artifacts.  The
attempt to chain the academic world's discourse to physical media of
distribution will seem in a very few years to have been short-sighted
indeed, and the CD (although it may do well as a storage medium), may be
housed in our museums near a portrait of King Canute bellowing in vain
at the tide lapping around his ankles.

3.  The Web comes into its own.

The World Wide Web has existed for a handful of years as the
unintentionally best kept secret of the physics research community.
With the creation of the MOSAIC interface by NCSA towards mid-1993, the
Web came into its own.  Its crude but effective html tagging makes it
possible to link text to text within documents, to link different files
and documents together, to access media such as video, audio and sound,
and to create access to complex documents that utilize many media.  Over
the last few months, several electronic magazines have been created
especially to utilize the powerful capabilities of the Web (eleven are
listed herein) and other serials migrated to the Web from ftp or gopher
sites, upgrades from unstructured text (bout thee dozen examples are
listed).

4.  Preprints, Working Documents, Technical Papers, and Works in
Progress.

Already the Internet has created an expectation that materials can be
shared among scholars and researchers, shared very early in the process
of scholarly communication with a wide circle of colleagues and critics.
The first researchers to exploit the potential of the net in this way
had already been readers of paper preprints and quickly migrated the
activity to electronic networks.  Electronic preprints have made such an
impact that last year the Stanford Linear Accelerator, which had been
distributing paper preprints for 25 years, announced it would do so no
longer, for their staff had found that over 50% of the preprints they
were distributing on paper in the last months of that effort had already
circulated widely through the Internet.  The fields that have adopted
electronic preprints readily include high energy physics, mathematics,
astronomy, and computer sciences, but in the last year non-science
disciplines have joined in.  We see, for example, the beginnings of
activity in history, philosophy, socio- legal studies, philology, and
economics.  The International Philosophy Preprints Exchange (IPPE) is
probably the most aggressive and well-developed in the humanities and
has a detailed listing in the Directory.  Some prominent
preprint/working papers services and sites now include:

% Los Alamos National Laboratory, Physics Service.  Offers access to
preprints on nuclear and high energy physics and related listings.  It
is most easily accessed by gopher to mentor.lanl.gov, which also
provides a link to the University of Chicago Physics Information Service
and other physics sites around the world.  This service was created by
Paul Ginsparg of LANL, whose software is now employed by a number of
preprint sites around the world.  It has been up available since 1991
and serves nearly 3,000 users and by November 1993 was handling some
20,000 messages per day.

% Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nonlinear Science Information Service.
For requests or information, message: gopher- [e-mail].

% Los Alamos National Laboratory, Computation and Language E-Print
Archive.  A fully automated server for papers on computational
linguistics, natural-language processing, speech processing, and related
fields.  This service began in April 1994.  For more information,
message: [e-mail]; subject: help.

% Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati/International School
for Advanced Studies, a post-graduate school of physics and mathematics
located in Trieste, Italy.  This site offers preprints in astrophysics,
condensed matter, functional analysis, relativity, high energy physics,
and nuclear physics.  It connects to other physics and mathematics
preprint sites, including LANL.  For more information, message:
[e-mail]; subject: get bighelp

% FSU bulletin board for lattice/computational preprints, as of 12/1/91.
An international mail server and a "clone" of the LANL server.  For more
information, message: [e-mail]; subject: help

% Cambridge Astronomy Gopher.  Connections to preprint databases in
astronomy and related fields/services.  Gopher to: cast0.ast.cam.ac.uk

% American Mathematical Society gopher offers a number of services of
interest to mathematicians, with a particularly extensive menu linking
to mathematical preprint servers such as Duke University, Kyoto
University, Los Alamos, and a number of others.  Gopher to:
e-math.ams.org

% HNSource (The History Network).  Extensive tools for historians,
including documents and texts.  To reach HNSource, telnet:
hnsource.cc.ukans.edu; login: history; no password is required.

% International Philosophical Preprint Exchange contains a number of
information sets for the philosophy community.  The preprints directory
includes unpublished philosophy papers or working papers that authors
are submitting for publication.  Gopher to: gopher apa.oxy.edu; e-mail
to: [e-mail]

% Economics Working Paper Archive also utilizes the LANL software.  It
is a gopher service for all areas of economics, primarily devoted to
giving interactive access to electronic working papers that have been
posted.  The papers are divided into 22 areas.  For information,
message: [e-mail], subject: help

% Philological preprints.  The American Philological Association has
approved an experiment whereby articles accepted and edited for its
Transactions (TAPA) will be posted for free network access as soon as
available.  Gopher to: ccat.sas.upenn.edu.  Look for Electronic
Publications.

% Socio-legal studies.  An early version is offered by Herbert Jacob at
Northwestern University.  Gopher to: gopher.nwu.edu; then select
"Electronic Reading Room," and then "Law & Courts Preprint Archive."

5.  Major Funding Initiatives for Infrastructure and Research.

And finally, colleagues at the AMS remind us that a major new trend is
the nation's investment in building the structures necessary to support
vast digital libraries.  There is now growing recognition, manifested in
the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries RFP jointly with
ARPA and NASA; an ensuing NASA RFP; and others, that the activities
detailed above, as well as many other areas of networked publication and
communications, need to fold into constructs that allow them to be part
of electronic libraries.

We who have had a part in this directory wish you happy cyber- hunting.
Without doubt, there is enough in this book to keep readers occupied
until the Fifth Edition, 1995.


Ann Okerson, Director
Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
Association of Research Libraries
21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC  20036
Phone:    [phone]
Fax:    [phone]
Email:    [e-mail]

May 6, 1994