Online submission and peer review is emerging as the next step forward for many journal publishers in an ever increasing drive to take advantage of technological improvements in transferring data electronically over the internet. The Electronic Submission and PEer REview (ESPERE) project was initiated in 1996 as an electronic Libraries (eLib) initiative of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Subsequently the project continued as a self-funding group composed of a consortium of learned society and commercial journal publishers intent on utilising the changes in technology to improve the services they provide to their authors as well as cutting their costs and increasing efficiencies. Traditionally the submission and peer review process has been a paper-based system with authors submitting to a journal using the postal service. Referees are then assigned, by a variety of methods, and sent copies of the manuscript to review and report upon. Technological advances have allowed other methods of transferring the information between parties such as facsimile and email, but although these methods speed up the process they suffer drawbacks in quality (facsimile) and size/platform limitations (email). More importantly they do not address how the information can be managed effectively.