Internet struggled not only for submissions by authors but for acceptance by users. In part, the problem the early electronic scholarly journals faced is the problem all new scholarly journals have — that of building a reputation and finding one’s place on the academic food-chain (Peek, 1996). Another major issue was the reality that the tradi- tional publishers, those who had published the print jour- nals, were not producing electronic journals beyond ex- perimental models (Peek & Pomerantz, in press). Until the Internet became commercialized, traditional publish- ers could not have been on electronic networks because they could not charge for services. As we discuss in this article, even after the traditional publishers could have participated in this form of electronic publishing, they held back. In 1996, Okerson, in the introduction to the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discus- sion Lists, observed that there was a growing number of publications created for the Internet that was still acceler- ating. However, in the course of a study we are conduct- ing, we found that, even in 1996, the traditional journal publishers were not a strong presence on the Web. In late 1996, and particularly in the summer of 1997, this situa- tion changed and utterly transformed the scholarly journal landscape. We discuss the implications in this article. Methodology The purpose of this article is to discuss a subset of a study that is still under way. In the broad study, we are tracking the history and evolution of all electronic ‘‘seri- als’’ used by the academic community. As we were con- ducting the study, however, we found that the new entry PUBLISHING ISSUES The Traditional Scholarly Journal Publishers Legitimize the Web Robin Peek and Jeffrey Pomerantz Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail: rpeek@simmons.edu; jpomerantz@simmons.edu Stephen Paling Emmanuel College, 400 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail: paling@emmanuel.edu This article examines the entry of the major academic publishing houses into World Wide Web ( Web ) publish- ing. The study identified that during 1997, traditional aca- demic publishers made significant commitments to put- ting tables of content, abstracts, and the full-text of their print journals on the Web. At the same time, new services and organizations emerged that could ultimately com- pete with, or eliminate, the need for certain segments of the industry. The authors suggest that these early experi- ments in Web publishing began unevenly with areas that needed improvement. The article concludes with a dis- cussion about the implications of the traditional aca- demic publisher’s presence on the Web. As debates go, the issue of whether computers should be a vehicle for the distribution of scholarly journals has continued over two decades, the earliest project being the Electronic Information Exchange System ( EIES ) begun in October 1976 (Hiltz & Turoff, 1993). Although proj- ects and experiments have been undertaken since, the early efforts, before the Web, rarely had an opportunity to reach a ‘‘critical mass’’ which was necessary to allow scholarly electronic journals a realistic chance to succeed. In discussing the TULIP (The University Licensing Pro- gram) project, Lynch (1995) argued that ‘‘because Else- vier did not completely dominate scholarly publishing in any discipline,’’ ( p. 12 ) . . . TULIP failed to achieve the critical mass of subject-specific information required to make compelling the use of the materials provided by the project to subject specialists. The early scholarly journals on Bitnet and the pre-Web  1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 49(11):983–989, 1998 CCC 0002-8231/98 / 110983-07 / 8n56$$1229 07-08-98 12:55:03 jasba W: JASIS