Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Vol. 1, August 10, 1998

Opening Editorial

Welcome to Volume 1 of the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality. This journal has been in the gestation stage for over one year, and is finally taking on life on the Internet. It is a work in progress, and the appearance, format and content will be continually changing as we learn how to work in this medium. We are not web masters and/or programmers, but sexual scientists who want to make our work available to a wider audience, at low cost to ourselves and nothing to the reader.

We are a product of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, and will become a part of the outreach of this well established organization as it continues to expand worldwide. A link to the Institute Home Page will be found on the main page of the Journal. For now, the Journal will be free to all who find its pages. Each annual volume will be archived on CD-ROM and available for purchase by libraries and individuals. Articles and other content can be downloaded and used for research and reference, as long as proper credit is given.

Our goal is to provide a forum for the increasing volume of sexuality research being conducted but not being published because of the relatively small number of pages available in the current paper publishing world. We do not intend to replace the esteemed and high quality journals of the sexual (and other) sciences, but to provide a place for many of the papers that cannot fit into their limited hard copy pages. We have no significant limit on pages we can publish, and can include photos and other graphics that would be impossible for the paper journals to afford, and we expect to have a much wider circulation due to the wide reach of the Internet. We will be adding pages and articles as they are available and approved, so the content will be constantly increasing. There will be no scheduled publication dates, but a constant updating as the material becomes available.

We can provide a place where small projects can be passed on to other researchers, where posters by students and their professors, normally shown at a conference to a limited number of attendees, can reach a wider audience. We intend to publish dissertations and thesis projects, which normally would not be found outside their original institutions. Initially we will use the resources of the Institute, which has a substantial body of original research, but will welcome submissions from all fields of sexuality research, all disciplines and all cultures where valid and usable research can be found. We will not be constrained by the need for statistically significant results, but will publish good papers where the finding was important but not necessarily mathematically significant. We will publish articles of general interest to the field of Human Sexuality that are not necessarily research based, but provide food for thought for the reader, and ideas for research. In all cases, the decisions of the editors are final as to what submissions will be published, but we intend to be more flexible than the typical academic publication.

We will also publish letters and responses to articles when controversial issues arise, and link them to the articles so that a history of comment and follow up can be found. Announcements of conferences, call for papers and other items of interest to sexual scientists will also be included. In short, we will explore the possibilities of electronic publishing in order to make sexual science available to a wider audience.

As we grow, both in size and in knowledge of the electronic world, we expect to have to change and grow to stay healthy. The submission process, which we intend to keep wholly electronic, will change as the software changes. Papers submitted in web (html) format will reach the reader faster than those submitted in more common word processor format and require work on the part of the editor to reformat. Our skills in this area are small compared to those in the other part of the internet sexual world, the world of sexual commerce, so do not expect a fancy page, but one full of information that may be of use to you in your life and work.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions, as well as your submissions for publication. Welcome to EJHS.

David S. Hall, Ph.D.
Senior Editor

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