A Report on the PEAK Experiment

Abstract

Electronic access to scholarly journals has become an important and commonly accepted tool for researchers. The user community has become more familiar with the medium over time and has started to actively bid for alternative forms of access. Technological improvements in the communication networks, paired with the decreasing costs of hardware, create greater incentives for innovation. Consequently, although publishers and libraries face a number of challenges, they also have promising new opportunities.1 Publishers are creating many new electronic-only journals on the Internet, while also developing and deploying electronic access to literature traditionally distributed on paper. They are modifying traditional pricing schemes and content bundles, and creating new schemes to take advantage of the characteristics of digital duplication and distribution.