CRISP '97, Oldenburg, Germany, Aug. 31 - Sept. 4, 1997

The new electronic techniques have already brought a lot of improvement in the process of scientific communication between physicists: scientific discussions, submission of manuscripts, better editorial process, etc. But several problems still remain largely unsolved, ranging from long term archiving to issues such as multiple use of documents (document structuring), or easy exchange of mathematical formulas within e mail messages. For the future, there seems to be a lot of attraction in the idea of a single data base for physics in the whole world, which is not contradictory to keeping individual journals with their own intellectual style, or creating new journals on top of the base. The prospect is still speculative and experiments should be lead to explore all promising avenues. The result could be a new communications system where learned societies would play a more important role than in the past.