Science and scholarship on the World Wide Web: A North American perspective

The potential significance of the World Wide Web for science and scholarship is analysed from informational, communication, and behavioural perspectives. Key factors to be taken into account are (i) scale, (ii) cost, (iii) conviviality, (iv) community, and (v) legitimacy. It is argued that the Web will have a transformative effect on the way scientists and scholars access information and present the results of their research to globally distributed peer communities.