The world of scholarly publishing has changed in reaction to the invention of the Internet, but in my opinion not fast enough. During my tenure as president of IACR we managed to at least secure copyright for publications in IACR proceedings and the journal of cryptology, but to this day I feel that we did not accomplish enough.

My concern is that our current model of using a commercial scientific publisher does not adequately serve the interests of science. In particular there are a large number of people who do not have free access to our publications, and it creates an insular society when our publications are not widely available to non-members. In the long term I expect that all of scientific publishing will gravitate to a free model of publishing, but the change may take some time.

The e-print archive has shown that it is easy to build and maintain an electronic archive of literature. If we apply our standard reviewing and refereeing process to an electronic mechanism, it seems that we would create a better environment for distribution of our science. I'd like to hear from others what concerns they have about a move to completely free electronic publishing, and how should IACR proceed in the years to come.