None of the current design team has a background in day-to-day publication of paper journals, nor did any of the previous members. But we were all scholars of one sort or another and knew how we and our scholarly colleagues used the journal. Our thinking was not constrained by conventional publishing practices, apparently making it easier for us to develop new features more easily. During the early design phase, it became apparent that the astronomical library community had great insight into how the journals were used, and we tapped their expertise as well as the opinions of our colleagues.

We have been working with electronic communication for a number of years -- we have been using electronic delivery of the abstracts of meeting presentations since early 1991 (well before the Web). We produced our first electronic publishing plan in May of 1992. We achieved all we set out to do.