Introduction

In an early paper on electronic journals (ejournals), Odlyzko (1995) uses the example of Encyclopaedia Britannica as a formerly flourishing business that got into real trouble a few years ago by ignoring the electronic media. Subsequently, Encyclopaedia Britannica collapsed and was sold to Jacob Safra who is currently investing additional funds to cover losses and revamp the business (Melcher, 1997). Remember when these elite and scholarly books were sold door to door? Now the expensive sales force has been dropped and while print versions can still be bought in bookstores, the focus is on electronic products. Think about it. This compendium had two centuries of tradition behind it and has always been considered the most scholarly and best known of the English-language encyclopedias. Odlyzko (1999) quotes Evans (1997) on Britannica's near death:

Britannica's downfall is more than a parable about the dangers of complacency. It demonstrates how quickly and drastically the new economics of information can change the rules of competition, allowing new players and substitute products to render obsolete such traditional sources of competitive advantage as a sales force, a supreme brand, and even the world. s best content.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, because of the way it was being marketed and sold, had enormously inflated costs. Individuals paid $1,500 to over $2,000 for each set that probably cost $200 to print, bind, and distribute; editorial costs were minimal in the overall picture. The greatest costs were administrative overhead and a huge sale force. Today, Encyclopaedia Britannica can be bought on a CD-ROM for about $125. It also is available, free of cost as of October 1999, over the Internet
(www.eb.com). The electronic version has the same great pictures and stories and also has the advantage of a search engine to find the content that one is looking for. Our point here is that the content of the scholarly publication did not change; rather the medium of presentation changed. Scholarship refers to the content of a publication not the medium of presentation. even though the new medium has tremendous implications for the publication, the type of information that can be presented and the cost of presentation.

In this introductory article to our electronic publishing issue, we first discuss the "explosion" of ejournals, we then outline what is meant by an "ejournal," what is meant by scholarship, and the "serials crisis" that promoted the inception of ejournals. After laying the groundwork for discussing scholarship in this new age of dissemination of scholarly information, we then discuss whether this digital form of publication can be called a "paradigm shift" in the traditional sense of the word (Kuhn, 1970).