Thinking in electronic terms

What will emerge as the dominant design(s) of the “information package” of the future? How do we resolve major obstacles to the creation and utilization of electronic documents? What concepts, terms, and design principles need to be defined to discuss these questions meaningfully and to start answering them? What do these new concepts, terms and design principles mean in editorial and publishing practice? Drawing on the experience of developing: Living Reviews in Relativity, an innovative online journal for physics, the paper discusses these latter questions. The paper highlights some of the information needs which Living Reviews fills and explains how the principles guiding its design attempt to meet those needs. These design principles are “synergy”, “adaptability”, and “utilizability” of information. In addition, the paper discusses a basic assumption that, rather than having readers, Living Reviews has users for whom we are providing a research tool. Combining that perspective with the fact that we are offering (literature/research) review articles, and with the fact that we are working in an electronic environment which allows multiple forms of indexing and presentation, we have decided to treat our reference information as highly significant. The paper discusses how we treat this information as significant, and the impact we expect this treatment to have