Electronic publishing constitutes one of the most exciting themes nowadays, amongst academics, at least, though substantial effects of IT usage for communication purposes in other than academic sceneries have also set off enthusiasm on people involved with that. Within the academic environment the use of IT for communicating research by scientists and scholars from different bodies of knowledge...

Introduction Scholarly publishing in books and journals, like lecture series, workshops and conferences, are forums for scholarly communications whose character can be influenced by the media of communication. With each electronic invention, many scholars hope that new media can expand authors' or speakers' abilities to reach new audiences. They hope that listeners or readers will hear new voic...

Scholarly communication is truly global. While in the past, articles based upon scientific research were primarily from the United States and Europe, today countries such as China, South Korea, and Brazil – along with others that were minor contributors a decade or so ago – are becoming major players. Journals of regional importance have emerged that are worthy of consideration. In parallel, a ...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the perceptions of knowledge and information sharing by the Polish academic community. An electronic questionnaire was used to gather opinions of respondents. The presented results are a part of the findings of empirical studies carried out amongst academics from various types of universities and academia located throughout Poland. Keywords—Academics, In...

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...

When we conduct scholarly surveys, we occasionally encounter difficulties in grasping the vast amount of related papers. Because academic papers have relationships, such as citing and cited relationships, we considered utilizing them for supporting scholarly surveys. In this paper, we propose a method for visualizing relationships among papers, and we construct paper graphs using two types of r...

The last few years have seen the emergence of several Open Access (OA) options in scholarly communication, which can broadly be grouped into two areas referred to as gold and green roads. Several recent studies showed how big the extent of OA is, but there have been few studies showing impact of OA in the visibility of journals covering all scientific fields and geographical regions. This resea...

Open science refers to all things open in research and scholarly communication: from publications and research data to code, models and methods as well as quality evaluation based on open peer review. However, getting started with implementing open science might not be as straightforward for all stakeholders. For example, what do research funders expect in terms of open access to publications a...

MICHAEL MABE Director of Academic Relations, Elsevier, and Visiting Professor, Depar tment of Information Science, City University, London The number and the growth characteristics of scholarly journals have been matters of some debate for a considerable time. Many assumptions about the future of the scholarly communication system have been predicated on very high estimates of the number of jou...