Provides a brief historical background of electronic journals and delineates both positive and negative aspects of the technology for academic libraries. Topics include accessibility; subscription costs; multimedia capabilities; technological, sociocultural, and economic barriers; refereeing, or peer review; copyright and licensing; selection and…

Discussion of CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment), a five-year research and development project at Cornell University (New York) that tried to make scholarly journal articles available in electronic form, focuses on the user response to the system. Highlights include interfaces, article viewing, printing, searching, conversion issues,…