Scholarly publishing

Abstract

Scholarly publishing serves the formal communication needs of scholars or researchers and derives from, and is constructed to reflect, their aspirations and behaviour. Specifically, journal publishing was invented by Oldenburg in 1665 to solve some of the competitive jealousies that existed between the experimentalist founding fathers of the Royal Society. The solutions he came up with have endured to the present day and have even survived the transition to electronic delivery. This article surveys the reasons why this should be so and examines the modern world of electronic journal publishing with particular reference to the players in the publishing cycle, the digital transition, economics and the advent of open access. © 2009 Academia Europaea.