We are beginning to see the appearance of electronic journals. Are these the harbingers of very dramatic changes in electronic publishing, or are they just another in a long line of fiddlings and experiments that have not in any fundamental sense changed the nature of the scholarly journal? The stability of the scholarly journal in print-on-paper format has proven to be remarkably robust, resilient, and resistant to change. It was argued almost two decades ago, for example, that we had already reached the point at which it would be both less expensive and more efficacious to deposit journal articles in one central database, and from that database print, for each then current recipient of an STM (Scientific, Technical, Medical) journal, their own customized journal consisting of all the matches to their own individual profile of scholarly and research interests. Yet, neither that, nor anything like it, has ever happened.
It is the thesis of this brief piece that electronic publishing in its present and future Internet or Internet-like format is sufficiently different that electronic publishing will burgeon and that it will fundamentally change the nature of scholarly publishing. Why?
The best way to answer that question and thus to present the thesis is to recall Derek Price's (1976) urn model of law. Lotka's law is simply the observation that the authorship of scholarly papers is nonuni-