As co-editors of this themed section of New Media & Society, we introduce the four articles comprising the section and briefly address facets of the changes transpiring in scholarly publishing and, more generally, scholarly communication. A plethora of issues and developments is related to this transformation and we suggest the diversity and challenges involved. We mention one development in mo...

With this paper, we hope to foster debate about the place of open access (OA) in scholarly publishing. After providing a background to OA’s development and current state, we examine some of the accusations leveled against it: that OA publishers are predatory, that OA is too expensive, and that self-depositing papers in OA repositories will bring about the end of scholarly publishing. After cont...

A free flow of ideas and information is vital to the process of scientific inquiry, and in turn to the ability to address economic, environmental and social development issues both in the sub-Saharan Africa region and globally. Most of the challenges facing scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa are global and do not respect national boundaries. Scholarly publishing enables research finding...

172 The Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, established by the Modern Language Association in 1999, set out to examine the current state of academic publishing in the fields of languages and literatures. The committee’s charge was to investigate and understand the widely perceived crisis in scholarly publishing and make recommendations to address the situation. Librarians, e...

Introduction. This paper reports on a study undertaken for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which explored the economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models. Rather than simply summarising the study’s findings, this paper focuses on the approach and presents a step-by-step account of the research process, highlighting the combination of process mapping, acti...