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This paper provides an extensive survey of the recent literature on scholarly publishing and its conversion to the electronic medium. It then presents the results of a questionnaire survey of the UK‐based scholarly publishing industry. The results of this survey suggest that the publishers are moving quickly towards the use of the Internet as a major medium for the distribution of their products, though they do not expect an early print publication. They also do not expect that any alternative system, based on scholars providing their results free of charge at the point of use, will seriously threaten the future of the commercial scholarly publisher. They do, however, perceive several significant difficulties in the near future. These include a shortage of appropriately trained staff, uncertainties about pricing mechanisms, lack of adequate budgetary provision by universities for library purchases, and unrealistic expectations on the part of scholars that electronic information should be inexpensive.

This article explores recent developments in the production and delivery of scholarly journal articles in digital form. It identifies the key stakeholders as authors, publishers, librarians and end users. It explores their concerns with regard to the digital journal production and delivery chain. It also explores the interrelationships of different stakeholder groups and considers how their concerns accord or conflict. The paper goes on to review cost and pricing developments. There appears to be no relationship between production costs and subscription prices of scholarly journals. Journals are priced according to what the market will bear, but, at the same time, the market is inelastic. As a result, prices have consistently increased annually at a rate well above the general inflation rate for the last two decades. Digital publishing by publishers has done nothing to relieve this problem. The ‘serials crisis’ has been the impetus for a number of developments that aim to use digital technology to reduce costs for the HE sector. These include alternative models of journal production such as that proposed by Harnad, and initiatives that aim to influence the structure of the market for scholarly journals with a view to driving prices down such as SPARC and HighWire Press. These developments are reviewed.

This paper aims to examine the reasons for the high costs of scholarly journals.

A brief review of the literature on journal publishing costs is carried out. The paper focuses on the economics of scholarly English language journals published mainly in the USA and Europe, but which are sold worldwide, largely to academic and research libraries.

Journal literature has long played a prominent role in the scholarly communication chain. In recent decades, however, the scholarly communication system has been facing a crisis due to the ever‐escalating costs of journals. Two of the features of the journal publishing industry cited a decade ago and still valid today are a lack of competition and perverse incentives. “First‐copy cost” is reported to be the main reason for high journal prices both in print and electronic publishing.

The paper provides a useful overview to researchers and document supply librarians, enabling them to achieve quickly a clear picture of journal publishing industry costs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate scholars’ attitudes toward informal publishing and dissemination to provide a view of the challenges and advantages of using such channels. Although considerable research has been carried out in relation to peer-reviewed scholarly publishing, relatively few studies have investigated the adoption of informal scholarly communication platforms in the scholarly publishing process.

The paper deployed a grounded theory approach using semi-structured interviews as a qualitative research tool. A theoretical sample of 40 researchers in 4 universities were interviewed to gather data regarding informal publishing, platforms, factors that affect the researchers’ decision and the use of informal channels in dissemination.

Results of the interviews suggest that there is an increasing trend among researchers toward informal publishing and dissemination throughout the scholarly communication cycle. The paper shows that there are three types of scholars who are involved in the scholarly communication process: conventional, modern and liberal scholars. Each of these scholars carries different beliefs regarding the scholarly communication process.

This paper was conducted on a relatively small sample of academic researchers, and therefore, the results cannot be easily generalized into a wider community of scholars.

The paper provides insight into informal scholarly publishing practices using a grounded theory approach. This approach helped to capture the changes in both scholarly publishing practices and the adoption of informal techniques among the scholarly community.

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

This is a comparative investigation of how university libraries in the United States, Canada and Spanish-speaking Latin America are responding to predatory publishing.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings was used to identify the top ten universities from each of the US and Canada, as well as the top 20 Spanish-language universities in Latin America. Each university library's website was scrutinized to discover whether the libraries employed scholarly communication librarians, whether they offered scholarly communication workshops, or whether they shared information about scholarly communication on their websites. This information was further examined to determine if it discussed predatory publishing specifically.

Most libraries in the US/Canada sample employ scholarly communication librarians and nearly half offer workshops on predatory publishing. No library in the Latin America sample employed a scholarly communication specialist and just one offered a workshop addressing predatory publishing. The websites of the libraries in the US and Canada addressed predatory publishing both indirectly and directly, with US libraries favoring the former approach and Canadian libraries tending towards the latter. Predatory publishing was rarely addressed directly by the libraries in the Latin America sample; however, all discussed self-archiving and/or Open Access.

Brazilian universities were excluded owing to the researchers' language limitations. Data were collected between September 15 and 30, 2019, so it represents a snapshot of information available at that time. The study was limited to an analysis of library websites using a fixed set of keywords, and it did not investigate whether other campus units were involved or whether other methods of informing researchers about predatory publishing were being used.

The study reveals some best practices leading to recommendations to help academic libraries combat predatory publishing and improve scholarly publishing literacy among researchers.

The purpose of this article is to review the trend in academic libraries toward including scholarly communication, and by extension, electronic publishing, as part of their core mission, using the Cornell University Library as an example.

The paper describes several manifestations of publishing activity organized under the Library's Center for Innovative Publishing, including the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), Project Euclid (http://projecteuclid.org), and DPubS (http://DPubS.org).

Libraries bring many competencies to the scholarly communications process, including expertise in digital initiatives, close connections with authors and readers, and a commitment to preservation. To add publishing to their responsibilities, they need to develop expertise in content acquisition, editorial management, contract negotiation, marketing, and subscription management.

Academic libraries are making formal and informal publishing a part of their core activity. A variety of models exist. The Cornell University Library has created a framework for supporting publishing called the Center for Innovative Publishing, and through it supports a successful open access repository (arXiv), a sustainable webhosting service for journals in math and statistics (Project Euclid) and a content management tool (DPubS) to enable other institutions (libraries, scholarly societies, presses) to engage in similar ventures to increase the dissemination of scholarship and to lower the barriers to its access.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution in terms of shares of scholarly book publications in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in five European countries, i.e. Flanders (Belgium), Finland, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. In addition to aggregate results for the whole of the social sciences and the humanities, the authors focus on two well-established fields, namely, economics & business and history.

Comprehensive coverage databases of SSH scholarly output have been set up in Flanders (VABB-SHW), Finland (VIRTA), Norway (NSI), Poland (PBN) and Slovenia (COBISS). These systems allow to trace the shares of monographs and book chapters among the total volume of scholarly publications in each of these countries.

As expected, the shares of scholarly monographs and book chapters in the humanities and in the social sciences differ considerably between fields of science and between the five countries studied. In economics & business and in history, the results show similar field-based variations as well as country variations. Most year-to-year and overall variation is rather limited. The data presented illustrate that book publishing is not disappearing from an SSH.

The results presented in this paper illustrate that the polish scholarly evaluation system has influenced scholarly publication patterns considerably, while in the other countries the variations are manifested only slightly. The authors conclude that generalizations like “performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) are bad for book publishing” are flawed. Research evaluation systems need to take book publishing fully into account because of the crucial epistemic and social roles it serves in an SSH.

The authors present data on monographs and book chapters from five comprehensive coverage databases in Europe and analyze the data in view of the debates regarding the perceived detrimental effects of research evaluation systems on scholarly book publishing. The authors show that there is little reason to suspect a dramatic decline of scholarly book publishing in an SSH.

This paper aims to bring together information on whether any evidence exists of a commercial conflict between the creation of digital archives at research institutions and by key subject centres of excellence, and the business of journal publishing.

Relevant publications, including articles published in refereed books and journals, as well as informal commentaries on listservs, blogs and wikis, were analysed to determine whether there is any evidence of a commercial relationship.

Most of the published comments are highly subjective and anecdotal – there is a significant emotional overtone to many of the views expressed. There is precious little hard evidence currently available to support or debunk the idea that a commercial conflict exists between repositories and journal subscriptions. The situation is made more difficult by the many technological, sociological and administrative changes that are taking place in parallel to the establishment of repositories.

Separating the key drivers and their impact is a major strategic challenge facing all stakeholders in the scholarly communication industry in future.

This is an important area which requires close monitoring – the possible threat that the established journal publishing system could be eroded away by a new “free” scholarly information system needs attention. One significant study in this area is being undertaken by the PEER group, funded by the European Commission with hard evidence being collected by UCL's CIBER research group. The results from this impartial investigation will be very welcome.

The paper shows that relationship between repositories and journal subscriptions is vague.

The lack of a country-wide data on the extent to which academic librarians in Ghana publish combined with perceived publishing challenges as indicated by a number of scholars including Opoku (2012) leaves much to be desired. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to seek the views of professional librarians in Ghana on the subject.

Using a sample size of 45 out of 50 academic librarians who make up the membership of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries, the study employed the descriptive survey research strategy in identifying the prospects and challenges associated with academic publications among librarians in Ghana.

Opportunities for growth, institutional encouragement, requirements for promotion, and opportunities for research training are some of the factors that motivated academic librarians to publish in scholarly journals notwithstanding the pressures to perform their professional duties. Challenges often encountered included lack of research grants, high rejection rate of publishing agencies, lack of research skills and difficulty in getting access to research journals.

On the basis of the above, the establishment of research fund and an award scheme for persons or units with the highest number of publications among others are recommended.

With the exception of cited works, all other forms of this research output are the handiwork of the researchers and have neither been a reproduction of existing research nor ever published in any other journal.