Internet struggled not only for submissions by authors but for acceptance by users. In part, the problem the early electronic scholarly journals faced is the problem all new scholarly journals have-that of building a reputation and finding one's place on the academic food-chain . Another major issue was the reality that the traditional publishers, those who had published the print journals, were not producing electronic journals beyond experimental models (Peek & Pomerantz, in press). Until the Internet became commercialized, traditional publishers could not have been on electronic networks because they could not charge for services. As we discuss in this article, even after the traditional publishers could have participated in this form of electronic publishing, they held back.
In 1996, Okerson, in the introduction to the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, observed that there was a growing number of publications created for the Internet that was still accelerating. However, in the course of a study we are conducting, we found that, even in 1996, the traditional journal publishers were not a strong presence on the Web. In late 1996, and particularly in the summer of 1997, this situation changed and utterly transformed the scholarly journal landscape. We discuss the implications in this article.
Methodology
The purpose of this article is to discuss a subset of a study that is still under way. In the broad study, we are tracking the history and evolution of all electronic ''serials'' used by the academic community. As we were conducting the study, however, we found that the new entry