Plans to bring science publications into the computer age are making slow but steady progress as individuals, academic associations, and publishers investigate the feasibility and economics of producing journals electronically. These online "publications" of peer-reviewed research articles will be circulated to scientists either directly, through existing computer networks that are accessible to most academics in the United States, or through online computer library centers.
Ironically, though much of U.S. science is conducted at the cutting edge of technology, the only successful online, peer-reviewed journals to date come from nonscientific scholarly disciplines in the humanities or social sciences. Among those publications in the works for scientists is an electronic journal by the Washington, D.C.-based American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), which also publishes Science. In this venture, AAAS is collaborating with the Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a computer library service and research organization whose computer network and ...
