has experienced similar growth. From sporadic access to the WWW server just over a year ago when the journal was founded, we are now viewed by over 1500 individuals each month from 38 countries around the world. Most documents are served to the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany and Sweden. However access by other countries is steadily increasing. [4] Curiously though, the EJS remains virtually the only journal devoted to sociology on the internet. At the time of this writing, the Yahoo index [5], generally considered the most comprehensive index for the WWW, of Sociology Journals contains two listings. One is for the Electronic Journal of Sociology and the other for a Hungarian journal entitled Replika.In this paper, I will provide an overview of the issues surrounding the emergence of electronic journal publication while attempting to relate them to our experience at the Electronic Journal of Sociology. Some of these issues are straightforward and include the direction in which e-publication is moving, the benefits of electronic publication, and the obstacles to its full deployment. These I will deal with in the first two sections of the paper. However there are currents in the emerging debates which are strongly reminiscent of the popular and semi-academic eulogies to the transformative and revolutionary impact of technology and information technology (Toffler, 1980; 1990; Levy, 1984; 1992; McLuhan, 1969). These claims are as untenable now as they have always been. Thus an additional task will be to provide a counter point to what amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the discourse on revolutionary change as it pertains to the explosion of electronic publication.Benefits(5)Publishing scholarly material electronically carries with it a number of widely recognized benefits. Almost all of those who care to comment on the subject recognize the extremely low cost of producing electronic texts, the high speed at which results can ...
