The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists: from journals as documents to journals as knowledge exchanges Available to Purchase

The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS) envisages a new concept of scholarly and scientific journal: conceived and managed by academics themselves; aimed at providing direct competition to high‐priced commercial publications; based on a business model whereby subscription revenues cover the non‐trivial cost of peer‐review; designed to maximise research productivity; intended as a platform for scientific and scholarly debate. The ELSSS model conceives the peer‐reviewed published article not at the final stage of the scholarly communication chain, but as an intermediate step, to be followed by Web‐based interaction among self‐selected networks of interested researchers. The paper suggests that the very concepts of “lending” and “document” need redefining in the case of the forthcoming generation academic‐led journals.