About Electronic Journals Ltd.
Set up in 1995, Electronic Journals Ltd. was my first business venture after I left academia. The business was designed to realise new models of publishing academic articles in the emerging and immensely exciting world of electronic publishing, itself brought about by the advent of the World Wide Web. EJL's flagship journal was Electronic Geology - the world's first purely online journal in the Earth Sciences, an achievement of which I am enormously proud. The business was closed after the sale of Electronic Geology to Springer Verlag of Heidelberg, Germany.Electronic Geology
Electronic Geology was the world's first purely online - or 'electronic' using the phrase in use at the time - academic Earth Science journal. The central idea, as with all electronic publishing, was the rapid dissemination of information to a global audience. This idea was of course not in itself new - the World Wide Web had been set up originally especially for the publication of scientific articles that could take years to reach the scientific community using traditional paper publishing. What was innovative about Electronic Geology at the time was the concept of a subscription model where readers would subscribe a flexible amount up front, and then download papers individually. Deductions would then be made from their subscription on a per paper basis until they ran out of credit. This mechanism, it was hoped, would bring enormous price benefits to academic departments which previously had to subscribe to whole journals even though only a small fraction of the content may be read. Electronic Geology published two volumes in 1996 before being sold to Springer Verlag of Heidelberg, Germany. Springer renamed the journal immediately to Electronic Geosciences and subsequently Visual Geosciences. After the sale I handed over editorial control to Professor John Clemens of Kingston University. Including the two volumes published under the Electronic Geology title, in all 13 volumes were published. Sadly the journal stopped publication in 2008. You can read the papers published under the Electronic Geology title entirely free here.
Articles published by Springer in the Electronic / Visual Geosciences titles can be found on the Springer Link site.