The Electronic Society for Social Scientists: from journals as documents to journals as documents exchanges

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 article not at the final stage of the scholarly communication chain, but as an intermediate step, to be followed by Web-based interaction among self-selected networks of interested researchers. The paper suggests that the very concepts of "lending" and "document" need redefining in the case of the forthcoming generation academic-led journals.