Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Jean-Claude Guédon holds his doctorate in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal. Professor Guédon is the founder of Surfaces, the first Canadian electronic scholarly journal still in existence, begun in 1991. His interest in both theoretical and practical issues regarding electronic publishing has led him to produce numerous papers on the subject as well as to present at conferences worldwide. Professor Guédon is not new to the research library community. In 1994, he presented a paper at ARL's Fourth Symposium on Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks and he has been actively engaged in projects pushing the boundaries of scholarly communication including serving on the steering committees of the Canadian National Site Licensing Project and the Digital Library of Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

Dr. Guédon presented this paper in May 2001 at the 138th Membership Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, a meeting held in conjunction with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries in Toronto. The presentation was received very positively. The paper is published by ARL with permission of the author in order to stimulate further discussion and new thinking on the important issues that he raises.