Electronic Documents - New Roles and Value-Added Contents

Few industries have experienced a degree of cha nge that equals the profound transformations that are now rocking the publishing industry. These changes, brought on by new developments in science and technology, are global in scale. There are three main driving forces behind this progress. The first is computing power. The second force, data communications and networking, has become commonplace in the same time -frame. The third factor, often underestimated, is information content. A vast proportion of scholarly literature is now being generated or converted in electronic format, stimulating the progress and acceptance of technology-mediated communications. Since the early 1990s, digital audio-visual media and computer-based documents are fast becoming an influential medium for both professional and scholarly communication [1],[2].