Scholarly Publishing

The submission, review, publication, dissemination and preservation of contributions to the Scholarly Record comprise Scholarly Publishing. Each of these elements is undergoing great changes, due to the advent of computers and networked systems. While some changes can be traced to the period after the Second World War, it was the advent of computer technology, photoduplication systems and distributed networks that accelerated the pace of change very greatly, especially in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The postwar era also saw the expansion of enrollment at American colleges and universities, and very great Federal support for research activities in the sciences and technology mainly, due to Cold War pre-occupations. More Americans pursued college education, took advanced degrees, and then continued as investigators and teachers in their chosen areas. One outcome of this expansion was a tremendous increase in the number of academic publications, including the foundation of many new journals, as career advancement became linked to productivity, measured in numbers of publications.

Academic meetings and scientific congresses also proliferated, and each released its proceedings.

Indexing and abstracting services expanded, and many new ones were founded to provide control over the expanding serials literature.

Mainframe computer systems were introduced into publishing to help create the products and to manage operations. Libraries also introduced computer based systems for their catalogs, and for other purposes. Remotely searchable literaure services emerged in the early 1970’s. The emergence of the desktop microcomputer caused the vendors of searching services to pursue the “end user” market, consisting of attorneys, nurses, physicians and scientists, rather than the limited market of libraries and librarians.

The advent of the Internet and World Wide Web finally closed the gap between citation searching and obtaining the original article, since it became possible to unite “discovery” and “harvest” functions in one session. Publishers began to create electronic versions of their journals and make these available to libraries or to individuals on a leased subscription basis.

Publishers provided schemes such as the Digital Object Indentifier (DOI) to gurarantee that a web resource would have a unique and persisting identifying element, and the Cross Ref system, in which cooperating publishers allow access from appended references to the text of the articles cited in a bibliography.

The prices of scholarly materials increased very greatly, especially for STM journals. Library budgets could not keep pace, and as a result purchases of books, periodicals and audiovisuals in other disciplines were reduced. This “serials crisis” threatened to dislocate library acquisitions very seriously, but there seemed no way out of the situation. Web-based alternatives, in the form of Open Access journals and Insititutional Repositories seemed to provide at least a partial answer, while raising many issues themselves.

Academic publication was once orderly, and even staid, not to say stuffy. But in the new century, it is quite a disordered and tumultuous place.

  • Technological experiments and innovations compete with anxieties about long-term preservation.
  • New methods of information dissemination threaten revenue streams, and seem to menace copyright and other intellectual property provisions.
  • Publishers have taken on the totally unfamiliar task of preservation, something once left to libraries exclusively.
  • Formats such as the electronic book seem promising, after a disastrous initial product launch. Certain works of reference may never appear again in printed format. (The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary would comprise 40 volumes and weigh one quarter ton if it were printed.)
  • The financial situation of academic libraries remains difficult, especially in view of the great increase in leasing of resources as opposed to purchase.
  • Publishers have succeeded in making enormous amounts of content available electronically, but these riches remain subject to restrictions, such as affiliation with a college or university, and so large sections of the public are unable to use them, including university graduates who became accustomed to easy access to digital content while they were students.

The new century sees the scholarly publishing industry both triumphant and theatened. Research materials are now available in quantities that would stagger scholars of previous generations. But established publishers face challenges from new techniques and face an increasingly dissatisfied and confrontational customer base.