45 BEACON

recently had the privilege of participating in a formal debate that was held as the closing session of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting.The topic of the debate was: "Be it resolved . . .that it is time to kill print" This represented a timely and provocative topic among this crowd of publishers (both nonprofit and for profit), publishing vendors, and librarians.Each side had two debaters (a librarian paired with a publisher), and the teams chose which side of the resolution to argue more or less by lot.My debating partner and I ended up on the side arguing in favor of the resolution--that is, that all of us who publish journals should stop printing them and only deliver the content online.This is an issue the AMS must face at some point, so it seems appropriate to use this column to relate the substance of this session.Even though the debate format was intended to provide an enjoyable and somewhat lighthearted closing event for the SSP meeting, ever/one in the audience that afternoon has been seriously grappling with the "if, when, and how" of discontinuing print journals in favor of online delivery.