ABSTRACT

The advent of digital communication has created challenges for publishers of scholarly materials; it has threatened to revolutionize the process of scholarly communication and change the fundamentals of the publishing process forever. But has it? This chapter investigates to what extent scholarly publishing has been affected by the transition to digital communication, what opportunities have been created and how the transition is shaping the future of the industry. It breaks down the publishing process into three stages – input, processing and output – to analyse how much each of these areas has been affected and if some areas of the publishing process have been affected more than others. It analyses the changing business models in the scholarly journals market and looks at the effect that the introduction of Open Access (OA) publishing has had on both the subscription business model and the way that the communication of research is being financed. It finds that scholarly publishers have undergone a huge transition over the last 20 years, moving from a slow, print-based model to purely digital delivery in many cases; but for all that change, the process of scholarly publishing (peer review, editorial review and the structure of a scientific paper) has changed very little. What has changed is the way that users are using and accessing the information, and the business models that have now developed for digital media, such as the Big Deal and Gold OA. Many scholarly publishers are still in the middle of a transition to true digital publishing and the mechanisms involved in scholarly communication have yet to take full advantage of many of the technologies available today, and so this industry will have to continue to adapt and change to meet the needs of the next generation of researchers.

Introduction

The publishing side of the scholarly communication process has developed over hundreds of years, with many crediting the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in around 1440 as the starting-point. This invention led to the mechanization of book making and the start of mass reproduction of intellectual works, which over time grew into the modern publishing industry. Many of the scientific publishers still trading today can trace their roots back many centuries and have developed alongside the growth of science as an area of interest and research, playing a role in the communication of its discoveries.