International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2004‐2005: scholarly publishing in an electronic era

This latest volume in the International Yearbook of Library and Information Management series addresses the theme of academic communications in an era increasingly dominated by the accelerating pace of structural change, driven both by digital technologies and changing attitudes of key stakeholders such as libraries and academics. It has become an industry characterised by unrest and sharply contrasting views, witnessed in the clashes of opinion between the commercial interests of established publishers and the adherents of the new and opposing Open Access (OA) communications models. As academic publishing has entered this turbulent current period in its history, so has its political, economic and media profile grown accordingly, as the 2004 House of Commons Committee enquiry and report confirmed. The overall picture is complex and the future directions for scholarly publishing are obscure, as apparently contradictory trends and indicators contend for predominance. On the one hand, proponents of OA claim the future lies with their revolutionary restructuring; on the other, the commercial publishing industry continues to consolidate and produce pleasingly high returns for its shareholders. For librarians and information managers confronted with these major issues on a daily basis, it is essential to be able to gain an appropriately varied range of perspectives on the current and future state of scholarly publishing. In timely fashion, this volume has been compiled to assemble a range of expert commentary to provide an authoritative guide to the scholarly publishing landscape.

The editors of Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Era have marshalled contributors to cover all the major themes familiar to stakeholders. Several authors provide complementary historical perspectives that chart both the continuities and changes in the academic publishing industry, thus providing a helpful context to deepen the reader's understanding of why things are as they are (and equally, why so many want them to change so radically). These include the long crisis that has been building during the last two decades following years of publishing expansion since 1945, to the extent that the academic publishing market can now be described as “dysfunctional”. Output and prices continue to spiral upwards, far beyond the capacity of libraries to subscribe, thus dashing the optimism initially created in the mid‐1990s that the internet would promise to reduce journal costs. An industry whose business model is founded on positive cash flow (thanks to securing advance payment for annual subscriptions) is reluctant to abandon print and finds new electronic dissemination technologies are challenging the primacy of first print publication.

A number of chapters offer perspectives on the business and economic models that characterise the established academic publishing market and compare these with those developed by proponents of OA, self‐archiving and institutional repositories to transform academic communications for the modern digital era. One point is well made – much of the current market dysfunction actually arises from a situation in which many academic users are actually isolated from the real costs of acquiring print access to the very publications that they have created – as John Cox observes, price signals fail to reach the consumer. David Prosser records that initiatives such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the institutional repository and OA journals have all emerged in response to such “market dysfunctions” to improve academic research dissemination, impact, quality control and access. However, one implication that can be drawn from Cox's balanced review of the OA movement's challenges to traditional publishing is that the failure to address key costs questions may be rooted in this very same dysfunctional “distance” between production and consumption.

For some, the disruptive nature of modern digital technology offers the potential to revolutionise the academic publishing status quo to liberate both authors and organisations from the grip of commercial publishing oligarchs. However, another (disaggregating) trend is evident whereby many readers are now accustomed to search online databases or use links in course room systems that point directly to a specific article, thus reducing the primacy of the journal title. This contrasts with the established perspective of authors, journal editorial boards and publishers, for whom the title is a brand, a concentration of disciplinary expertise, crucially founded on quality control with evaluation provided by external criteria such as citations counts and impact analyses.

A welcome feature of this volume is that some contributors step outside the anticipated focus on current high‐profile topics – such as OA and institutional repositories – to examine how technological developments may cause equally significant future shifts in the patterns of scholarly communication. Indeed, the highly‐charged nature of the recent debate on serials seems to have overshadowed nonetheless important topics such as print monographs, which are themselves considered to be reaching a “crisis point with similar characteristics to journals publishing” (a spiral of declining sales and increasing costs). Louise Edwards examines the way that the e‐book potentially challenges the primacy of fixity, standardisation and dissemination created by printing and which are foundations of modern scholarly communications. The e‐book is poised to become part of a new system of scholarly communication, in which fixed text gives way to a world of dynamic text based on community and individual personalisation, thus changing our established sense of “publication”.

In an example typical of the wider perspectives evident throughout this volume, John Houghton's review of research analysing the economics of research publishing begins by identifying the key market factors such as “excludability” and “rivalry” characteristic of printed scholarly publishing and then demonstrates how, in the new online‐centric world, commercial publishers seek to recreate such factors to shape the marketplace to their interests. He then proceeds to consider how research practices are changing, identifying a two‐speed model emerging. This comprises the familiar kind of traditional disciplinary research, founded on peer review – that reinforces mainstream scholarly publishing – and a newer, multidisciplinary research mode reliant on less formal communication and dissemination, which is more amenable to OA models.

This collection brings together some excellent contributions on the current state of scholarly publishing, and offers the reader a helpful map of this complex, changing territory. Each essay is supplemented with references to both print and online resources, and the volume has an efficient index. One criticism is that there is a degree of repetition evident in several different authors each covering similar ground such as the causes of the serials crisis and the rise of the OA movement. However, this is balanced by the many insights into the future direction of academic publishing that this volume provides.