Dear Dr Manjunath: The ARL Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists First Edition (2000) lists 3915 peer-reviewed ejournals. You may find the following URL useful. http://db.arl.org/dsej/index.html This site has couple of useful articles. The "Foreword" is also informative as it indicates the growth in the number of ejournals over the years. As for the query on the first ejournal, the following article would be useful: Electronic Journals & Scholarly Communication, by Harter & Kim http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/archive/harter.html Here's an extract from the above article: _________________________________ Although electronic journals (or e-journals) have been under development since 1976 (Turoff and Hiltz, 1982) http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/archive/, e-journals in their non- experimental phase did not begin until the 1990s, with a few exceptions. The first peer-reviewed electronic, full-text e-journal including graphics was Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (OJCCT) (Keyhani, 1993) http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/archive/. In the most recently published list, and one of the few research projects involving e- journals, Hitchcock, Carr, & Hall (1996) http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/archive/ identified 115 scholarly, peer-reviewed e-journals in science and technology, and there are many more in the social science and humanities. These constitute the first wave of what are likely to be many more scholarly e-journals to come _____________________________________ However, it is not clear when it was started. Related Sources: The National Library of Canada has published the following guide: Electronic Publishing: Guide to Best Practices for Canadian Publishers. It is available freely at: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/9/13/index-e.html Another useful site is Electronic Journal Publishing: A Reader Version 2.0 http://www.inasp.info/psi/ejp/index.html This is a goldmine of valuable articles and one of the best sites to start with. For background info on trends in scholarly communication, please see: http://www.arl.org/scomm/index.html Happy reading! T.V. Prafulla Chandra --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NISC Export Services Pvt. Ltd. (an affiliate of NISC International, Inc. USA) S-1 Ballad Estates, St.Ann's School Road, Tarnaka, Hyderabad 500 017 Andhra Pradesh, India - Tel:+91 40 27001517 Tel/Fax:+91 40 27002538 WWW.NISC.COM A company in service to NISC worldwide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------