Products and Processes: How Innovation and Product Life-Cycles Can Help Predict the Future of the Electronic Scholarly Journal

Introduction We live in a time of change in the scholarly journal industry. This change predates the arrival of electronic publishing, but the increase in new technologies has accelerated many of its aspects. Indeed, many of the latest advances in e-journals have only been made possible by the development and adoption of new technologies such as multimedia personal computers, the Internet and World Wide Web, Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and so on. Such new technologies follow broadly predictable life-cycles which influence their adoption rates. What does the literature of technology life-cycles have to say about e-journals and how can it help us plot their future? This paper starts by considering technology life-cycles and adoption rates in general. Next it considers product and process innovation. It then looks at these lifecycles in the personal computer industry, before concluding by considering the implications of these concepts for e-journals in the near to mid-term.