Examines the conceptual models that help to understand the development and sustainability of scholarly and professional communication forums on the Internet. An alternative information processing model that considers information technologies as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs) and a method for modeling electronic forums as STINs are…

Presents a literature review that covers the following topics related to the Internet and unrefereed scholarly publishing: conceptions of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication; research manuscripts and preprints; the growth of unrefereed e-script publishing; a hybrid publishing model; controversies about communication via unrefereed…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the future of electronic communications in science. The analysis concludes that communicative plurality and communicative heterogeneity are durable features of the scholarly landscape, and that field differences in the use of and meaning ascribed to communications forums are likely to persist, even as…