Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals

Scholarly publishing is on the verge of a drastic change from print journals to electronic ones. Although this change has been predicted for a long time, trends in technology and growth in the literature are making this transition inevitable. It is likely to occur in a few years, and is likely to be sudden. This article surveys the pressures that are leading to the impending change, and makes predictions about the future of journals, publishers, and libraries. The new electronic publishing methods are likely to improve greatly scholarly communication, partially through more rapid publication, but also through wider dissemination and a variety of novel features that cannot be implemented with the present print system, such as references in a paper to later papers that cite it.