For some time, SISSA has been involved in electronic publishing as a mirror of the Los Alamos preprint archives. Now we are going to take a new initiative : we intend to launch a new electronic journal, that will be written, run and distributed by electronic means. Its name is JHEP, Journal of High Energy Physics, and it will be freely accessible on the Web. Physicists put themselves into another profession role, the publisher's one, not only to communicate with each other without intermediation, but also to solve budget problems, caused mainly by the increasing cost of the journals' subscriptions.
The printed version of JHEP will be published by the Italian Physical Society ; this should solve the problem of archiving. The print journal will also serve for legal deposit purposes. Moreover, the Italian Physical Society will act as copyright holder.
The quality assessment of articles submitted for publication is another important issue in electronic publishing. The peer reviewing in JHEP will be done in a "classical" way, assuring the global quality of the publication.
The article submission in JHEP is fully automated : this will make the procedure quicker and cheaper. A software robot processes the papers and analyses the keywords which have been added by the authors to their texts ; on the basis of this analysis, it makes the choice of the appropriate editor. Then the editor chooses the referee.
If a paper is accepted, it will undergo the author's proofreading, and finally it will be made available on the JHEP site.
For the sake of uniformity inside the journal, all texts will be formatted in TEX by the robot using a specific macro package.
JHEP will be distributed through seven nodes located at CERN, in India, in Italy, in USA, in Russia, in Brasil, and in Japan. The URL of the nodes are :

jhep.sissa.it (Italy)
jhep.cern.ch (Switzerland)
jhep.yukawa.kyoto-u.ac.jp (Japan)
jhep.tifr.res.in (India)
jhep.jinr.ru (Russia)
jhep.mse.jhu.edu (USA)
jhep.ift.unesp.br (Brasil)

The costs for JHEP (estimated in 100 k $ per year) will be covered by SISSA, INFN and ICTP. Three people are involved in the production of the journal. Others may use our robot, but not our financial or human resources, in order to produce scientific journals.
Please note that the electronic full text will be freely available, and the subscription to the print journal will have a (low) cost.