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Our Policies

General Info

Commercial

Academic

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Mission Statement

Electronic Journals Ltd. aims to provide a rapid Internet publication service of high-quality articles for the world-wide business and academic communities.

Company Operations

The World Wide Web is the only publishing medium used by the company.

Electronic Journals Ltd. is heavily involved in the publication of commercial articles and consultancy reports. At present, we have nearly 200 reports being prepared for on-line dissemination.

The first academic journals to be published by the company are Electronic Geology and Electronic Medicinal Chemistry. For details on how to submit articles for publication, subscribe to, or act as a referee for these journals see the Electronic Journals homepage.

We are also developing advertising services to augment our academic and commercial publishing portfolios.

Additionally we also provide Desk Top Publishing and Software Licensing Services.

Company Philosophy

Electronic Journals Ltd. wish to make clear that the views expressed below are those of its Directors alone and are not necessarily those of any associated institutions, journal editors or other individuals connected in some way to the company.

"....it has so far been difficult to make money out of electronic publishing. 
Most of what is available is distributed for free. Some publishers see the 
Web as a promotional device.........In time many publications will indeed 
be distributed mainly electronically.........Other characteristics of the 
Internet - global reach, speed, interactivity, the ability to combine text 
and sound and moving images - add up to an immense opportunity to do new 
things." 

				The Economist, leading article, June 29th, 1996. 

• Commercial articles are published in an identical manner to our academic journals: an abstract of the published document is stored separately and is accessible using our search facilities by all those who log onto our pages. Having read the abstract, if an individual wishes to download an article he or she must have an account with Electronic Journals Ltd. If they already have an open account, then they can download the document and their account is debited immediately. If you wish to check out how the system works, then you can use the dummy accounts to download the test documents for our academic journals. Go to file downloading instructions for more information.
• Our policy in virtually all instances is to act as disseminators of material under license. Dissemination will be entirely electronic - Electronic Journals Ltd. has no interest in hard-copy publication methods. The period of exclusive license is negotiable in each particular instance, but would not normally be less than one year. During the period of the license, copyright remains with the author(s) of the work.
• We are willing to electronically disseminate material also published in hard-copy under contract, subject to negotiation with the copy-right owners and creators of these works.
• Because the overheads involved in electronic distribution are so low when compared to hard-copy, we can offer authors a revolutionary new deal in the dissemination of their material. If they wish, authors can lease the use of our Web space, software and expertise for a flat charge. In return, we pass over to the author ALL revenues resulting from the purchasing of their material. Hence the authors of valuable works are not left with the slender royalties often associated with traditional hard-copy publishing methods.
• Alternatively, if authors would rather not pay an up-front flat rate, then we can instead charge a proportion of all generated revenues resulting from publication. However, under this option we require additional guarantees as to the commercial viability of the material to be published and an exclusive license of dissemination.
• At present we publish material in two formats: Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML) and the lesser known Portable Document Format (PDF). As you are probably aware, the Web pages you are reading were designed using HTML, and within the limits of the format, we can design these to an author's specifications. The new PDF formats offer great opportunities for Internet publishing - as they allow documents to displayed and printed in fully Desk Top Published form. Hence their standards of presentation are equal to those expected of hard-copy publications. PDF Documents are also platform independent: provided the computer is equipped with a suitable PDF reader (available free from Adobe Corporation) they will appear exactly the same on any computer anywhere in the world. Such uniformity and sophistication is obviously essential for most authors who want their work professionally presented. In the very near future, we believe PDF will become the dominant format for electronically published material.
• Although immediate access via the Internet is viable for most documents, it may not be so for excessive large documents which in terms of storage require enormous volumes of Web server memory. In this case, we provide the option of storing these documents off-line and disseminating them upon request to subscribers, either by File Transfer Protocol or by traditional mail if preferred.

Company Address

It is our belief that electronic publication methods will provide solutions to many of the problems which have increasingly bedevilled academic publishing in the past few years. It is our goal to provide individual academics with a system of publication far superior in terms of speed and economy to the service currently given by traditional 'hard copy' publishers. In the sections below we set out what we believe are main problems in the system today and our approach to their solution.

Referee Anonymity

Traditionally referees have had the option of remaining anonymous to the authors of the manuscripts which they review. As scientific journalists have pointed out in recent articles, this system may be abused by referees to hold up the publication of the work of rival research groups or individuals. The true extent of such malpractice is, of course, unquantifiable but in all probability constitutes a very small fraction of anonymous reviews. Supporters of the existing system could also argue that it allows referees to give highly critical but fair and well-balanced reviews of the work of close colleagues or friends which they do not wish to hurt or offend.

However, it is our belief that these considerations must be outweighed by the damage done to the peer-review system by the suspicions roused in authors that their manuscripts have been rejected by anonymous referees with sinister ulterior motives. Secondly it is all too easy for irate authors to form (often wholly erroneous) opinions on the identity of anonymous reviewers based on their own prejudices. At its very worst a level of paranoia is reached where rumours are spread about the actions of fellow professionals which amount to a serious slander on their reputations. It is therefore the widespread suspicion of wrongdoing, rather than any wrongdoing itself, which most undermines the present review system.

In response to this problem it is policy of Electronic Journals Ltd. that authors can receive the names of referees who have left their reviews unsigned upon request. No exceptions whatsoever will be made by the company in this regard.

Payment of Referees

To date, academics acting a referees have very rarely been paid for what is after all a highly-specialised consultancy service, often given to a commercial organisation. The referees reward was instead deemed to be that he or she would receive advanced knowledge of yet to be published research within their discipline. However in recent years many factors have combined to exert enormous strains on this system. Firstly, the spread of an academic culture of 'publish or perish' and the ever increasing competition for research positions within academic institutions has contributed to an explosive growth in papers and books published. However, the increase in academic workloads has not been met by a commensurate real-term increases in wages. Thus increasingly poorly paid and overworked academics are coming to view the unpaid refereeing of manuscripts as a lower and lower priority. This can only mean that now or in the future journal editors will find it ever more difficult to find referees to review manuscripts quickly, with the result that in the future the time between the submission of a manuscript and its publication will increase. Even now, the amount of material published in many fields has reached such a level that even manuscripts which have been passed for publication by referees with a minimum of required corrections have to be substantially revised by authors, due to the number of papers published between submission of a manuscript and its return to them. Such modifications further retard the publication time of scientific research.

A second problem with the existing system is that conscientious reviewers who review manuscripts rapidly and thoroughly receive ever greater numbers to review from journals, whereas academics who do not have this attitude receive fewer or none at all. As all researchers benefit from the publication of research findings, the load is spread unfairly.

The policy of Electronic Journals Ltd. is therefore that referees who review manuscripts rapidly and thoroughly will be paid for this service. The company therefore invites academics at Ph.D. level or above to become reviewers for its titles.

See also information for Referees

Library Space

In many countries library budgets appear to be in steep decline with the result that the number of periodical publications stocked by individual institutions is actively declining, or at least have failed to keep pace with growth in the number of periodicals. However, the staggeringly high cost of most periodical issues means that it is difficult for academics to meet this shortfall with individual subscriptions (see next section).

It is our opinion that electronic or 'virtual' media offers an increasingly economical alternative to hard-copy publishing. Therefore Electronic Journals Ltd. intention is to be an entirely 'virtual' publishing company, with no production of hard-copies. In order to ensure the historical permanence of submitted work, several backup of accepted manuscripts will be made and kept. Unless subject to special agreement, we guarantee to authors the permanent availability of published work. Published manuscripts will remain available on the network for a number of years (10). In the event of the company ceasing to trade, then this guarantee is also currently underwritten by Kingston University, which will continue to disseminate material published in Electronic Geology and Electronic Medicinal Chemistry in perpetuity. (See term and conditions in instructions for authors).

Pricing Policy

The current price of most periodicals places them well beyond the resources of undergraduate or postgraduate students and even senior academics. As hard-copy periodicals are often published in non-thematic issues, any individual subscriber may find only one paper (or even none at all) relevant to their research within any given issue.

In our opinion there seems little reason why purely Internet-based journals should be published in issues or volumes. Articles will be published individually and given a unique number for citation purposes. Subscribers to our titles will only pay for the articles they wish to download. It is the policy of Electronic Journals Ltd. that the cost of downloading individual articles will be very low. However, Electronic Journals Ltd. reserve the right to change its pricing structure in future if this proves financially necessarily. Our pricing policy is geared to the mass market and we believe that it offers a very flexible package at the institutional, research group or individual level.

See also information for Subscribers

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