Electronic scholarly journals have become at once a new and economical means of scholarly communications and, at the same time, a challenge to traditional methods of publishing the fruits of research. The pace of the evolution and the transition from paper to electronic publications continue to be discussed and debated at all levels of academia, among scholars, librarians, scholarly societies, and within commercial publishing “houses” of the scholarly publishing world. The purpose of this research was two-fold: to study (a) why electronic scholarly publishing is evolving so slowly at this point in the ejournal movement, and (b) why some scholarly organizations and disciplines have ventured into electronic publishing while others continue to resist or ignore the transition. The study employed two established research methodologies: (a) 31 qualitative face-to-face interviews and (b) document analysis of over 160 electronic forum responses.; These methods were used in concert to compensate for the fact that each of these sources had particular strengths and weaknesses. The categories of findings regarding the slow development of electronic scholarly communication included economic issues, copyright, speed and convenience, peer review, reward structure, access, papyrophiles, archives, and publisher profits.
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