And although we perhaps do not want to embrace the ethos of the current joke in the marketplace, all of us in academic publishing need to wake up to he [sic] reality of these dramatic changes, or we might indeed become "roadkill on the information superhighway." Both inside and outside of the realm of learned journals, traditional publishers have recently responded to this threat by taking steps to exploit the potential of the internet. Okerson (1995) has noted that so far their efforts suffer from a number of drawbacks. The downside of the publishers' experimentation continues to be that the experiments are limited in critical ways. The biggest drawback is that print publishers are seeking ways to preserve the paper image electronically, offering not text but pictures of text in bit-mapped images, often through the rapidly-obsolescing CD-ROM delivery vehicle. Such efforts fail to take advantage of the best characteristics of networked communications: speed of distribution and access facilitated in several ways. Thus, many of the current experiments, while offering some value, do not advance the interests of the user as fully as possible via electronic networked delivery (Okerson, 1995). The impression that Okerson and others leave us is an us (not-for-profit publishers) against them (big-bad-publishing-companies) impression that leaves "us" in a privileged position vis a vis our use of information technology. Yet as we known the status quo does not role over easy and there is no reason to think that traditional publishers will not find a way to exploit internet technologies to their fullest extent while still retaining their privileged and costly positions at the centre of the scholarly communication universe. Our concern as sociologists should be with the way the publishing companies choose to respond. We need to ask what's happening inside the traditional publishing companies as they scramble to adapt to the new publishing environme...
