THE COPYRIGHT LAW - HOW IT WORKS AND NEW ISSUES IN ELECTRONIC SETTINGS

The Study of Electronic Literature for Astrophysics Research (STELAR) experiment is exploring what is required to bring the astrophysics literature online. The experiment is being conducted jointly with publishers, authors, copyright holders, libraries, and others involved in the production and dissemination of the astrophysics literature. STELAR is a pilot project designed to Study the technical and practical aspects of making the refereed scientific literature available online. The primary database contains machine-readable abstractions of articles from eight journals of interest to astronomers. The current publicly accessible system contains the text of the abstracts, which are being indexed and made available using Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and World Wide Web (WWW), providing a plain English query capability and simple document retrieval. The complete system, which includes the ability to retrieve scanned images of the pages of selected articles, is available to test subjects through selected astronomical libraries. © 1994 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.