As we look beyond current archive models on the WWW, we propose substituting "professional working spaces" for the raw archive metaphor because it highlights action--academics working, producing, and playing. The "raw archive" mentally binds us to a lifeless collection of materials (the "living" archive notwithstanding) and conceals the social relations which operate in producing, contributing, and evaluating those materials.

We want to re-envision virtual places exemplified by new models which would exploit technologies of the future: hardware and software that might not currently exist. Our ideal models are recognizable as a heterotopias. They will provide precise and determined functions (professional, disciplinary, or multidisciplinary); they will contain and juxtapose varied and incompatible virtual spaces (like museums, libraries and MOOs); they will be demarcated by boundaries and entry ways (such as protected websites); and they will serve specific functions in relation to all other spaces (such as publishing houses, universities, conference centers). Most importantly, our ideal models will be highly collaborative and interactive. They will truly be living spaces. We need new models, which don't just reflect cultural formations and social orders, but challenge them. Just as new paradigms draw on historical models and community standards, we build upon those electronic archives which reflect significant shifts away from current traditional publishing standards.

Of the four models we discuss, the first and last are for-profit publishing models, while the middle two are not-for-profit editorial models. The for-profit journal model is the first and most conservative model because it serves as a likely transition scenario for the print industry's shift from exclusively print-based production to integrated online archives. As other models are developed and tested, it is likely that this first one will become the least used of the four. The second, ex post editorial board model, follows current print journal models that have been adapted for discipline-specific pre-print raw archives like those of the physics e-print archive. The third, web editors model, moves away from print institutional models to university-based or freelance web editors. And the fourth model turns to large-scale third party information managers, what Malcolm Getz calls electronic agents.