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

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... cle not at the final stage of the scholarly communication chain, but as an intermediate step, to be followed by Web-based interaction among selfselected networks of interested researchers. The paper suggests that the very concepts of"lending" and'd ocument" need redefining in the case of the forthcoming generation academic-led journals. Electronic access The research register for this journal is available at