BACK TO: The Publication Process

The scholarly publication process has always been slightly different from the publication process for normal materials. As before, we shall look at this process historically.

Early Scholarly Publication Process
Scholarly publications arose rather late, not until the 17th century. Before that, scholarly communication was primarily limited to open letters and correspondence. One of the first of the scholarly journals was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in 1665. How did it operate?

Educated people tended to belong to special societies. One of them would have an idea (in the illustration, Sir Isaac Newton), and would deliver a paper to one of these special societies. Often, the society would send these papers to a printer, and send copies to the members of the society.

It turned out that others outside the society (including libraries) wanted copies of these papers as well, so demand grew. The societies did not want to get into the business of printing and distribution, so these aspects of their journals were given to professional publishers.



Scholarly Publication Process: Formalized
This process evolved to become regular scholarly journals. As scholarship grew, the number of scholarly articles increased tremendously, and to keep the quality of the articles high (not everyone is Sir Isaac Newton!), a system was put into place called Peer Review.

Peer Review is a process by which experts in the field review an article for quality before it is published. When an article is submitted by the author, it is sent to the peers, who are experts in the subject of the article. The peers can decide that:

• the article may be published
• the article may be published with changes
• the article may not be published at all

In turn, the author can decide not to make the changes the peers demand. Negotiations can follow, but if the neither side changes,the article will not get published in the journal. At this point, the author can submit the article to another journal. (Or today, as shown in the previous section, the author may avoid the process altogether and put it directly on the internet) As the following illustration shows, with the exception of peer review, the process is very similar to the other publication process.



Money
One of the main differences from the previous process is money. We saw earlier how everyone involved (the editor, printer, distributor, etc.) got a share of the money, with the publisher getting approximately 50%, and the author getting a part.

In scholarly journals, most of the time the authors receive nothing and the peer reviewers also receive nothing. The natural question is: why do scholars publish?

To understand this, we must return to the days before printing, when there was a patron-client relationship. In the case of scholarly publishing, there is a patron-client relationship, where the scholar plays the role of the client, while the university or institution where the scholar works is the patron. When a scholar publishes, this is seen to be positive for the institution, and the scholar will be rewarded by raises, promotions, time off for more research, and so on.

If the scholar is exceptionally respected, another university or institution may try to "steal" them away!

Scholarly Publishing Today
As we saw in the other publication process, the introduction of the Internet has changed many things, and changes are occurring in scholarly publication as well. In the last few decades, there have been several changes in the normal publication of scholarly journals, the main one being that prices for many scholarly journals published by professional publishers have become very high. For example, from 2000-2006, median prices for many scholarly journals have gone up from 42% to 106%. (See the Executive Summary in: Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices, 2000-2006 from LISU Occasional Paper No.37). Such price rises have gone on for several decades.

Because of these alarming trends, many scholars and institutions have been looking for alternatives. One alternative is similar to what we saw before, to use the Internet to connect more directly with the readers.