Overcoming intellectual and virtual access as barriers to utilization of electronic publications

A review of the purposes in scholarly publishing reveals that publishers of freely available electronic journals have the potential for positively transforming the highly problematic economics of scholarly publishing. But actual use of electronic scholarly publications shows that they present serious utilization barriers to would-be readers. Meeting practical awareness, indexing, and archiving needs in this new literature can overcome these barriers and is essential if such promising publications are to transform scholarly communication. Libraries and small electronic publishers have it within their power to meet these needs by integrating electronic publications into existing information systems, thus promoting the disintermediation of the economics of the scholarly publishing process that is essential to its continued growth.