On March 23th the University of Michigan Press announced that it will go all digital (no more paper publications!).  They will not reduce their press budget but use these resources in a more efficient way.  This may be a welcome change to members of the undergraduate faculty for whom monographs and other publications are essential for promotion.  Many of these are nowadays not published if deemed non salable as their print costs cannot be recuperated.  E-only publication will allow many of these types of books to be published and widely distributed.  Some feel that this is a return to scholarly ideals rather than the for profit-driven economics of most of the publishing world.   Duke University offers a different service call e-Duke.  For a flat yearly fee one can access all electronic books published that year by Duke.  Other free e-presses include the Australian National University, ACME e -press and UBC Canada. Here at UNC, an e-only journal (Innovate online) was started in 2004 and has been highly successful.

Those against e-publishing cite differences in publishing software which may limit access, resistance by readers to e-books, lack of reliable internet access in many countries and the need to create a new business model.  There is no doubt that e-reading devices such as the Kindle, Sony and iphone are becoming more popular and accepted (both the Amazon and Sony products display only in black and white).  E-publishing does not mean the end of paper as most of these presses offer a print on demand service for a fee.

The reality of this is that it is not the media (electronic vs. paper) that counts, but the quality of the publications. AJNR offers a reduced fee for the e-only version of the Journal.  Although a tough situation, the next step is to get rid of the PDF format which imitates print and is thus equally rigid.  Most AJNR web users however prefer the more flexible hyper text markup language (HTML) version of our articles as shown the large number of them that are dowloaded in this format.