eo clips. Should it be necessary to deal with tables, graphs, and multimedia, the labour requirements of the journal could increase drastically. At that point, institutional support would become a requirement. On the other hand, as the tools for publishing on the WWW become more sophisticated, even the toil associated with these tasks may be reduced to insignificant levels. Because the WWW and HTML is still developing, it is still too soon to come to any conclusions.One final comment before moving on. The significant reduction in the cost of producing electronic journals has one ancillary benefit. It eliminates concern over page length. Traditionally, paper based journals have placed strict limits on the length of articles they would publish. This of course has everything to do with the cost per page of publication and nothing to do with the requirements of scholarly communication. This restriction may have had an inordinate influence on the style of cutting edge scholarly discourse which, because of the need to pack as much information into 10,000 words as possible, is often thick and difficult to wade through, obtuse, and even "occasionally" poorly written. This has resulted in some cases in a discourse that, though not intentionally so, is fundamentally exclusionary. With the advent of electronic publication this straight jacket is removed since it costs fractions of a penny more to publish a 60 page document than a 30 page document. Of course, whether or not this will have a significant impact on scholarly discourse is an empirical question.SPEEDMuch more interesting than the reduction in cost, from the scholar's point of view anyway, is the significant increase in the speed of academic discourse that can be achieved via electronic publication. We are all familiar with the traditional delays associated with paper based publication. Indeed, it is not uncommon to have to wait 2 years (or more if revisions are required) from the date t...
