Astronomy journals go electronic.

One hundred years after Astrophysical Journal began publication, part of it has gone on-line. On Sept. 23, an electronic version of the twice-monthly Astrophysical Journal Letters, including figures, line drawings, tables, and mathematical symbols, debuted on the World Wide Web. The electronic version, known as EApJL, will be available 1 month before the paper copy of the journal at the Web site http://www.aas.org/ApJ/. Browsers will have free access until 1997.

The electronic journal has a special feature: Click on any reference cited at the end of an article, and the corresponding abstract appears on the screen--provided the reference was published no earlier than 1967. The browser can obtain a complete copy of the reference electronically if it has appeared recently in a journal published by the American Astronomical Society. Peter B. Boyce, the society's president, says the entire Astrophysical Journal will appear on-line within a year.

In a related project, the NASA-funded Astrophysics Data System, located at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., announced that by the end of the year it will have on-line the last 20 years of the following journals: Astrophysical Journal, Astronomical Journal, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, Revista Mexicana, and Observatory Reports of Skainate Pieso (Slovakia). The Web site for these journals is http://adswww.harvard.edu/.