MESDA believes that electronic journals are the future of scholarly publishing and that e-journals are growing into interactive forms of communication that are more powerful and user friendly than traditional paper-and-ink journals.

To quote Hal Varian in The Journal of Electronic Publishing (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/varian.html):

Each new medium has started by emulating the medium it replaced. Eventually the capabilities added by the new medium allow it to evolve in innovative, and often surprising, ways. Alexander Graham Bell thought that the telephone would be used to broadcast music into homes. Thomas Edison thought that recordings would be mostly of speech rather than music. Marconi thought that radio’s most common use would be two-way communication rather than broadcast.

The first use of the Internet for academic communication has been as a replacement for the printed page. But there are obviously many more possibilities.

Furthermore, the immediacy of electronic publishing eliminates the publisher’s need to wait for several articles to be readied for publication as an “issue.” Equally as important, the electronic medium allows for money saved on printing and postage to be redirected toward enhancing the journal’s quality for you, the reader.