As we roll up the first polluting kilometers of this new century, and after half a decade of experience with our Journal now behind us, we are asking ourselves a certain number of questions about the future. In these first years we have somehow been able to keep our production schedules and get out some pretty interesting numbers, some of which had elicited a rather enthusiastic public response. But it is, we are not afraid to say, a rather difficult row to hoe.

We have tried to do this without the usual supporting institutional structures, which may have been a mistake, though it has had for us the great advantage of leaving all aspects of editorial and production policy to us without any influence from commercial or other interests. On the downside since we lack the usual marketing resources, this has made it among other things somewhat difficult to get the level of subscription support that is needed to guarantee the journal's survival.

One of the avenues that we are exploring as a probe of the future, as you can see here, is that of morphing into either a purely electronic journal. Or, better yet we think, some combination of the two. We are not the only ones in this situation of course as we enter into this post-Gutenberg are. And though it is cold comfort we find it interesting to see that a reference as venerable and as indisputably valuable as the Encyclopedia Britannica are asking themselves many of these same questions, and are, as we, experimenting with the electronic/print mix in an attempt to find a way into the future. Their problem is also our problem, though some might note an eventual scale difference

Do you have any thoughts for us on this? One very helpful thing for starters would be if you would take the time to see if any of the institutions that you work with or know with a mandate in this area might be interested to support us as Contributing Subscribers. As part of our policy, we have made an effort to keep even these subscriptions affordable by the usual standards, which means of course that we need to have several hundred institutional subscribers just to help cover bare production costs.

If you do have anything to share with us on this, we would like to offer you as well as the usual private communications the possibility of going on line with a letter to the group as a whole. We are quite sure that the final solution that we find to this dilemma will be the result of a group process and useful feedback from people like you.