Our goal is that by June 30, 2000, all AGU journals will be available in both electronic and print versions so that members may subscribe to any AGU journal in either format. The one exception will be the new journal Earth Interactions, which will exist only in electronic form.

As early as 1993, the Publications Committee began setting the course for AGU's move to electronic distribution of our journals. The World Wide Web was not yet ubiquitous, and we could not have foreseen what the Web would mean to all of us. Although technology has changed some details of the original plan, the concepts remain valid and continue to guide us.

Foremost to AGU's approach is our intention to exploit the electronic medium in our publications and not simply replicate on the screen what can be done on paper. This principle is seen most fully in the development of Earth Interactions, but it is at the heart of all we are doing in electronic publishing. Exploitation of the medium means providing such features as manipulatable math, three-dimensional and moving images, other enhanced visualization techniques, data in electronic formats that can be imported for use with other computer tools, and links to external data files. Articles published to date in Earth Interactions have used such nonprintable features.

Additionally, through the electronic medium, we expect members to be able to customize their own information packages from material in all AGU journals. The nature of AGU as an interdisciplinary organization means that much of what is published is of interest to scientists in different fields. In the print-on-paper world it is difficult to provide packages that cut across the range of AGU subjects in ways that are most interesting and valuable to different cross sections of the membership. In the electronic medium, individuals can elect to receive certain types of articles on a subscription basis or individual articles on an as-needed basis, regardless of the journal in which they are published. Much of what we are doing today is preparing the way for this end state, where you will seamlessly create your own journal from multiple AGU sources.

We are developing an electronic publication database that evolves with time and provides a living, creative set of documents. For example, it is possible to provide links to comments on a paper or corrections to it. An article can also be linked to future papers that cite that article. These links are already in place in the electronic version of Water Resources Research. We also expect to link articles to external databases that may change and evolve. We think it is unlikely that we could provide the optimum intellectual richness possible in the electronic environment if we were to fix articles in time and serve them from a remote local area network or from a CD-ROM. To take advantage of the opportunities, to add related information regularly as each new issue is published, we will be delivering articles through the Web.

AGU has a responsibility to the geophysical science community to develop and maintain a usable archive of all the material we publish in electronic form. This obligation means that we must continually refresh files and be able to migrate information to new platforms and new media as technology changes. AGU's economic models and budgets are taking into account this new area of expense. In December 1996 the Council established a Perpetual Care Trust Fund for the maintenance and migration of AGU's electronic publication archives. The expense of publishing in electronic formats entails much more than the costs of the initial production or the costs of ongoing distribution. Monies must be put aside and invested to generate the operational dollars needed to protect and maintain the electronic archives for the future. We do not expect this to be a trivial expenditure over time and have already started to build the fund that will assure the Union can meet this long-term commitment to readers and authors.

One of the major unknowns of electronic publishing is how best to price these services. We expect that some kinds of information in electronic form will be made available to all without charge. AGU's current Web site has many examples of this type of service. Access to other material will be covered by the membership fee and made available only to members. Currently, the AGU membership directory online is such a service. Still other information will be made available only to those who pay an extra charge, either on some type of subscription basis or on a per-use basis. We expect that several subscription scenarios for members will be necessary to fulfill our goal for customization of the journal literature. Establishing the right mix and price formulas will be a significant challenge.

Some members have argued that we are moving much too slowly and see mid-2000 as an unacceptably long time for converting all AGU journals to electronic distribution. What is misunderstood by these commentators is our starting point. AGU is constrained in the approaches it can take in creating electronic publications because more than 70% of what we publish is provided by authors as camera-ready copy. Unlike most other scientific societies and perhaps all commercial publishers, AGU does not currently incur expenses for typesetting the vast majority of what we publish. Thus, unless we greatly increase subscription rates, we cannot afford to move to a system in which we pay significant costs to a vendor to translate author-supplied material into suitable electronic formats for online delivery. Our current plans call for working with author-supplied electronic files in ways that will not materially increase the cost of creating an electronic version and a paper version, which we must continue to produce for the foreseeable future.

To control the costs of publishing in the electronic environment, AGU must work with standard formats. Initially, only LaTeX files prepared with AGU macros will be accepted for electronic submission. This approach is now in place for Geophysical Research Letters; other journals will begin accepting such submissions this year. LaTeX is a widely used standard that can be used reliably for math. Other well-used markup languages would certainly include troff and groff, Rich Text Format (RTF), and Maker Interchange Format (MIF). All of these markup formats are saved and transported as ASCII files.

AGU has successfully dealt with LaTeX. Early experiments with RTF were not successful but further investigation with this format is contemplated. At the recommendation of the Information Technology Committee, we intend to stay with LaTeX as the first choice for electronic submission of journal articles until there is a well-accepted, international standard that easily and reliably can handle math across different platforms. At the same time, however, we expect to work with one or two alternate standard word processing packages to see how we can broaden the formats available to authors for electronic submission.

Finally, to meet its commitment to advance the geophysical sciences, AGU intends to retain the intellectual property rights granted to it by authors and be the sole distributor of its electronic publications. Arrangements through which AGU would license others to provide information on its behalf could undermine the economic basis of the publishing activity and thus of the Union as a whole. Because of the limited number of potential subscribers to our journals, our publications could not generate significant royalties from third-party distributors. We would not realize the income necessary to cover our publishing activities or the costs of keeping information available for future generations.

This overview has provided the key elements of AGU's electronic publishing strategy. During the coming months, you will learn more details through articles in Eos and see examples of electronic products on AGU's Web site. We welcome your comments and questions. They will help in translating these concepts into useful services for you. You can reach the Publications Committee and the headquarters staff by addressing e-mail to pubmatters@agu.org – John Orcutt, Publications Committee Chair.

Members of the Publications Committee: Hugo F. Bezdek, Stephen J. Burges, Andrew Dessler, Herbert E. Huppert, Roberta M. Johnson, William M. Kaula, Bruce D. Marsh, Donald L. Turcotte.