The Electronic Edition

The Electronic Edition

In the closing months of 1998 the Editorial Board of the Journal came to an agreement with The Commons to launch, initially on a trial basis, an electronic edition for world wide circulation -- the @World Transport Journal. This was felt to be a prudent step for several reasons.

First, we felt confident that it would help us reach a considerably broader readership than we had been managing to do with the hard copy -- and have more impact on policy and practice as a result (bearing in mind that this is after all our main objective).
Second, we were hopeful that the kind of communications arrangements that the Internet permits, would help us stimulate much more reader input and collaboration in the pages of the Journal itself. (That itself being one of our main objectives since the outset.)
Third, it struck us as a good way for us to be able to put our materials into the hands of students and others in the Third World for whom the usual $100.00 plus professional journal subscription posed a formidable barrier.
And last, we were moved to try this as a survival strategy. After four years of hard work, we found that it was simply not possible to cover all the expenses involved in running this as a high quality, independent journal operating without university, state or other subsidy, while covering the high costs of printing and reaching a highly dispersed and not always affluent international readership.

As of January 2000 the decision was made by the Board to move to a purely electronic publication format, with an exception. While each issue is to be made promptly available in our four-time yearly schedule on the Web site, we are also on the lookout for partners who may be interested in getting together with us to create special editions, treating matters of shared interest which can also be printed and distributed by them, both to lists of their own as well as to all our "subscribers", paid and unpaid.

The first of these collaborations took place with Volume 5, No. 3 which was produced jointly with the Umweltbundesamt (Environment Agency) of the German government, who subsequently printed a thousand copies and distribute them both locally and internationally. This is a formula which we intend to try to duplicate many times in the future.

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