Electronic Pre‐publishing for Worldwide Access: The Case of High Energy Physics

In spite of technical developments, electronic publishing in science and technology has had a slow start. This is caused by several factors,essentially managerial in character, such as standardization of text and image representation, quality assurance, the filing of reference versions, charging, and copyright control. Furthermore, in spite of the growth of the networked R&D community, not all users have easy access. Many of these problems are reduced in an area where much of the primary information proceeds via not‐yet‐copyrighted preprints, which are largely produced by advanced text‐processing techniques and put on“electronic bulletin boards”. Reports on some recent advances in this area, creating a direct access to bibliographic data and full‐text documents via a central OPAC and a distributed system of document servers.