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The two decades spanning the beginning of the twenty-first century have seen the rapid transformation of scholarly communication. In the most historic shift since Gutenberg invented movable type, the print journal, the dominant tool for disseminating research for over two hundred years, is being replaced by electronic publication. Made possible by digitization and the internet revolution, the process is irreversible and by no means complete yet. It promises profound and far-reaching change for the journals industry that will challenge its basic business model and transform the traditional roles on which it depends and the cultures it affects. The economics of the industry is riddled with perverse incentives; there is too little capacity to satisfy the growth in scholarly literature; the efficiency of the peer review system is being questioned; the role of research libraries is being reassessed; and, in some quarters, the need for journal publishers is being debated.
No wonder there is something of a crisis of confidence among publishers, as they may be threatened with a much diminished role and, in some quarters, with obsolescence. Is this fear justified? Will there be a place for publishers in a world where anyone can claim to be an author or indeed a publisher? The answers are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’: the threats are real, but the current situation is brimming with persistent demands and new opportunities.
Publishing used to be predictable
Forty years ago, in 1971, when the British Journal of Political Science published its first issue, the world was less competitive and change fairly predictable; or, at least, so it seems now. It was a world in which the motto ‘publish or perish’, while occasionally mentioned, was not regarded as integral to appraising and advancing knowledge in political science, as it is today. Above all, it was a world dominated by paper, the reach of which is restricted in various ways.
BJPolS was born into a world where the basic functions of journals as described by Henry Oldenburg and his colleagues at the Royal Society in 1664–65 – registration, dissemination, certification and archiving – still pertained over 400 years later.Footnote 1 There was no reason to challenge the role of journals in asserting the ownership of an idea, attracting recognition, establishing reputation and reward, and leaving a permanent record. The journals industry was operating with a settled business model, characterized by stable and durable relationships between publishers, scholars, libraries and agents. The standard subscription model accounted for the bulk of revenue, producing reliable forecasts and predictable cash flows.Footnote 2 There were far fewer political science journals, particularly of the specialized kind so common today. The general journal had greater importance in the discipline, and the journal article was, for the most part, less important than the research monograph as a vehicle for scholarly communication among political scientists.Footnote 3 Spending on higher education was increasing across the industrialized world, and resources were generally less constrained: research libraries subscribed to new journals, while university departments generously provided administrative support, frequently subsidizing the editorial office.
In short, readers’ usage expectations were much lower than they are today, the role of publishers was better defined and libraries had a clear sense of their place in the dissemination of knowledge.
Publishing is now more complex
In recent years the distribution of scholarly information has become increasingly complex. In political science, research continues to proliferate with increasing specialization and professionalization. In publishing, paper has lost its power to the internet, a consequence of a dramatic fall in the cost of handling and transmitting scholarly information. Change, always disruptive, seems more rapid and prolific.
The internet’s chameleon-like qualities distinguish it from past technologies. It has affected every aspect of the journals business – from the research behaviour of scholars, to the production process, to the means by which journals are marketed and sold. The internet is not simply a distribution channel, or a new way to communicate; it is also an information system, a tool for manufacturing goods and services and a market place.Footnote 4 Let us consider each of these properties in turn.
A Distribution Channel
Prior to the internet, dissemination – along with registration, certification and archiving – was considered to be among the primary roles of a journals publisher. Print copies of issues were mailed to libraries, and personal subscribers and authors received a limited number of off-prints for wider distribution to colleagues.
Today dissemination is myriad, including authors’ websites, institutional repositories and pre-print archives, among others. The internet allows for navigation within articles and linking between articles, functionality now routinely offered by CrossRef and publishers’ online platforms. Along with email and search engines like Google Scholar, the internet enables articles to be disseminated swiftly and widely, making it easier to find scholarly work. The internet is effectively undermining the role of the publisher as the principal disseminator of journal content.
A New Way to Communicate
The behaviour of researchers has been transformed by the range and power of the internet. Collaborative tools appear on an almost daily basis, increasing and enhancing the scope for cross-disciplinary inquiry, participatory learning and team-based research.Footnote 5 Informal means like pre-prints, personal websites, blogs, wikis and social networking sites are facilitating new kinds of research and new ways of communicating it.Footnote 6 Huge amounts of data – often remotely hosted – can now be processed and made accessible to small groups around the world.
An Information System
As important as the burgeoning supply of information is its changing character and structure. Heretofore, libraries acquired and stored paper content as passive objects in a largely static environment. Information is now dynamic, and resources are multi-layered. Trips to the library have been eliminated and time can be put to more efficient use. Keyword searches across JSTOR, for example, lead researchers to sources that would have remained invisible in a context constrained by field-specific bibliographies, indexes, keywords and abstracts. Linked footnotes among e-resources allow the seamless pursuit of citation threads that previously could not viably be pursued through physically dispersed books and journals.Footnote 7
Ownership is not what it was in the days of paper; in the digital world it consists in having access rights – either perpetual or limited to a specific time period. Libraries are, therefore, moving away from a preoccupation with building and preserving collections, towards identifying information they do not own and providing tools and services for accessing it.
A Tool for Manufacturing Goods and Services
Internet-based software makes collaboration easier, both within and among firms. The publishing process is made more seamless, as the tools used to produce the articles are fundamentally the same as those which create the differentiated products and services downstream, the new sales models and targeted marketing techniques.
The journal article begins its life with research, much of which will be conducted using the internet. It is shaped using information technology and shared with colleagues and collaborators via email and ftp sites. It is submitted to a journal’s electronic editorial management system that allows editors simultaneously and independently to assess the material and manage the review process. The accepted article is copyedited on screen and sent to the typesetters (who are really file manipulators and formatters in their twenty-first century incarnation) for formatting before the finished piece is transmitted to the publishers for mounting on their online platform, perhaps some months before publication of the full issue. Supplementary files and databases can then be added.
A Marketplace
Before the internet, the traditional subscription model was based on the practice of selling single titles to single libraries or individuals. Well over half the revenue of most mature journals is still generated in this way. However, as market dynamics have propelled serials online, they have increased the possibilities for disseminating the content at different levels of aggregation. This has presented an opportunity to enhance the marketing power of publishers, who have responded, via site licences, by increasingly bundling together the online versions of a number of titles – sometimes in a particular subject area, often across an entire list – to sell collective access to groups of libraries for a number of years at a time. At the same time, digitization has also made it easier to disaggregate, to sell single articles from a particular issue one at a time to individual buyers.
While economies of scale and aggregated expertise have increased the market influence of certain publishers on the supply side, the institutional landscape on the demand side is being reshaped by co-operative arrangements as well as stronger political and operational coalitions. The sheer volume of information on the market makes institutional autonomy less desirable or even possible.Footnote 8
The economics of scholarly journals publishing
At first glance the economics of publishing journals appears to have many of the key features of a highly competitive market – an almost infinite number of consumers (readers) with a vast array of authors and publication opportunities in journals and elsewhere. However, this image is a deceptive one, for beneath it lies a series of rigidities and imperfections, the outcome of which is a market that is uneven and inconsistent. On the positive side, we have witnessed a huge increase in dissemination, the opening up of archival material and the efficiency gains of searching and linking software. On the negative side, there is the disproportionate influence of the larger publishing houses, the restriction on librarian choice imposed by new sales models, the difficulty of launching new titles outside of an established bundle and, in political science, an apparent lack of capacity among reputable titles to cater for the supply of high-quality articles.Footnote 9
The inefficiencies persist in part because of the peculiarities of information goods, which include scholarly journals. Information goods distinguish themselves from ordinary goods in a number of key ways.Footnote 10 First, they are ‘nonrival’, in the sense that their use by any one consumer does not, unlike food for example, prevent simultaneous use by any number of other consumers. Secondly, they are infinitely expansible, such that their quantity can be arbitrarily increased at negligible cost, as is the case with digital music. Thirdly, they are aspatial, where any copy is the original and is anywhere and everywhere at the same time. It is these features that account for the ability of journals to be sold, via the internet, to many different buyers – indeed an infinite number of them – at the same time.
The distinctive features of information goods and the fact that knowledge is frequently classified as a public good help to explain important observations in the market for scholarly journals. They account for the difficulty, on the one hand, of rewarding scholarly innovation and, on the other hand, of distributing them to society. Historically, different mechanisms and institutions – principally in the form of intellectual property rights and patronage – have emerged in response to the tension between individual reward and social dissemination efficiency.Footnote 11 In the world of books and journals, copyright legislation was developed to protect the expression of an idea, while universities and institutions, such as the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and the National Science Foundation in the US, are obvious examples of patronage.
In addition to the features described above, there is another characteristic of journal articles (and titles) that is central to shaping the market. Ordinary goods produced by one company tend to be substitutes for those produced by another, making a competitive market. Competing journals, however, are not substitutes for each other.Footnote 12 Rather, they are complements, publishing articles that are related to each other. Each newly published article may be similar in many respects to a previously published article, but it does not substitute for it. Instead, each one adds to the general stock of knowledge incrementally.
These features and institutions have resulted in a market for information goods that is quite unlike that for ordinary goods, producing allocations that differ sharply from those in other competitive markets. The key to understanding these allocations lies in the relationships between publishers, librarians and scholars, where the incentives of the different parties are not aligned and where the final users (the research community) are detached from the price setters (the publishers), with libraries occupying the space in between.
The relationship between publishers and librarians is defined by the lack of substitutability between journals, which confers a degree of monopoly power on publishers, particularly those of higher-ranked journals. Driven by their commitment to maintain and expand their research holdings, librarians generally feel compelled to subscribe to as many of the key journals in the field as their budgets will permit. They are reluctant to replace an existing journal with a new one, almost irrespective of price. Indeed, journals do not compete on price, since this is not what determines their success. Rather, they compete on perceived quality; and differences in quality between journals are not reflected in price differences. Demand is therefore relatively price-inelastic and the scope for profit maximizing behaviour on the part of publishers is increased.
Authors of journal articles, unlike authors of textbooks, are typically unpaid. They have little interest in the price of the journal or the revenue of its publishers, and focus instead on the ability of the publisher to maximize the impact and readership of their work, in the long term increasing the likelihood of promotion and higher pay.Footnote 13 Articles tend to be written with a particular journal (or at least a small subset of journals) in mind, taking into account its distinct personality and the niche it occupies, rather than its impact on the library budget.
Librarians rely on the guidance and judgement of scholars, but they alone make the final decision to purchase. The decisions of librarians, therefore, seem to be informed by researchers and not determined by price. Yet, pricing does directly affect libraries, which have for some time now been subject to severe budget constraints. In short, we see a market characterized by an interaction between publishers, many of whom aim to maximize profits, librarians who seek to maximize their holdings and authors whose principal objective is to maximize their scholarly reputations; and where the price mechanism is inhibited by the detachment of the final users from the price setters.
The landscape is further complicated by the coexistence of large commercial conglomerates and smaller not-for-profit publishers (university presses and learned societies). The differences are perhaps best reflected in their pricing policies, attitudes to smaller, low-circulation titles and their appetite for new launches. Both groups naturally seek to publish titles with high reputations. Yet, commercial publishers arguably do so for instrumental reasons – quality titles often command higher prices and rents. Not-for-profit publishers tend to focus on quality for more fundamental reasons, which chime with their values and mission independently of profit, but always in a context where editorial operations require support, where rents and salaries must be paid, and where innovation does not come cheaply. The decision calculus of the commercial companies is to maximize profits, while the not-for-profit sector attempts to ‘satisfice’ on revenue by pricing closer to average costs rather than to marginal costs.
One way of making sense of the environment is to visualize two relatively distinct markets operating side by side. On the one side is the academic market, governed by factors relating to research agendas, reputation and the quality of the output. On the other side is the commercial market, which shadows the former, and is not solely concerned with research and quality concerns.Footnote 14 In general, the variables influencing tastes and preferences in the academic market are weakly related to those determining behaviour in the commercial market and price, as we have seen, is a poor guide to changes in value.
What are the implications of this institutional landscape? The most general answer is to be found in what is now commonly referred to as the ‘journals crisis’, describing an environment where increasing serial prices, often well above the rate of inflation, have combined with static or decreasing acquisitions budgets to create a crisis for university libraries, forcing them to cancel subscriptions, to refrain from ordering new journals, and to purchase fewer books. The public-good nature of scholarly research and the peculiar features of digitized information goods combine to produce inefficient market solutions, which are in turn compounded and exaggerated by a situation in which the explosion in research output, the pressure to publish and the demand for certification are not being matched by corresponding increases in funding.
The problem of launching new journals is a case in point. On the face of it, the online world is more conducive to launching new journals in political science: dissemination is considerably easier and cheaper and the barriers to entry are reduced, particularly if the online-only route is taken. There are numerous publishers who will agree to take on a new title, but fewer of the established houses seem prepared to take the risk nowadays, particularly if the new title cannot be linked to a society membership or ‘piggybacked’ onto an existing bundle of journals (say that of a learned association), allowing it at a stroke to circumvent many of the hurdles of newness. Those journals that have no option but to publish independently of any bundle have to make their own way. In the current climate, with no track record or reputation they can expect to gain few institutional subscriptions, and are forced to rely on inclusion in the publisher’s existing package for income, which may well offer wide visibility, but cannot, in the initial years at least, promise the levels of income that a new journal might have expected fifteen or twenty years ago from traditional subscription sources. Facing a reduced income stream the odds are stacked against any new journal covering its set-up costs for the first five years, limiting the editorial support that can be offered and restraining the incentive of publishers to experiment.
Information on mature journals – metrics, surveys and informal impressions of the quality of contents – is relatively good. Readers and potential authors have little information on new journals, however, until articles have been purchased and read. It is hard, therefore, for consumers to assign values or to express preferences, with no prior history or reputation to fall back on. New journals are further disadvantaged by the difficulty of obtaining an Impact Factor in its early years, which can be a significant disincentive to young scholars to submit their work.Footnote 15 Thus, publishers tend to offer content from new launches free for the first few years, relying on the reputations of the editors and authors, as well as the publisher’s brand to market the journal. In a context where editors of leading general journals point to higher rejection rates and to increasing numbers of respectable articles chasing too few slots in elite journals, there are few winners.
In any relatively complex, adaptive system, where institutions for producing and disseminating goods do not deliver socially optimal outcomes, it is to be expected that new institutions will arise, particularly in an environment of rapid technological change. Researchers and libraries are responding to the allocation inefficiencies by turning away from the current ‘reader pays’ subscription model towards new business models, the most notable of which is the ‘author pays, open access’ model. There are many versions of the model. In its simplest form, it collides with traditional subscription financing, requiring that publication is financed at the front end by author (or funding body) payments, rather than by readers and libraries, in return for which all research articles are made freely available through online repositories. ‘Author pays, open access’ is one way of realizing the enormous potential gains of the internet, and it does so by addressing the distribution inefficiencies of the subscription model, where many possible readers are excluded despite the negligible additional cost of allowing them access. Despite a number of new initiatives by publically funded bodies and publishers, it is only likely to grow in importance in proportion to the level of support it receives from funding bodies. The average cost of each peer-reviewed article in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) has been calculated to be in the region of US$4,000 to US$10,000, suggesting that author fees would be prohibitively expensive for individual scholars in HSS.Footnote 16 Unless research is funded differently, open access is unlikely, therefore, to affect publishing in political science and related disciplines for the foreseeable future.Footnote 17
How is the landscape changing?
Authors, Editors and Peer Review
Familiar boundaries are changing throughout the marketplace, beginning with readers, authors and editors, particularly between home and the office. It is now possible to conduct research, write and edit at any time, anywhere on the planet.
Changes in author behaviour among political scientists appear to have been modest: most still appear to devote considerable energy to publishing in top journals. The internet has, however, made it easier for authors to make their work visible and accessible without publishing in journals, particularly those suffering from the slowdown in the publishing process and increased competition for space in the top journals. This is especially true for high-profile authors affiliated to leading departments, for whom the benefit of publishing in top general journals may well be comparatively small.Footnote 18
By allowing these authors to circumvent the traditional journal system, the internet could potentially lead to the unravelling of the peer review system and the hierarchical authority it brings to journals. In his study of the leading economics faculties in the United States, Ellison notes that the data are ‘consistent with a version of the decline-in-peer-review theory in which it is being in a top department, rather than having a strong publishing record, that enables an author to attract attention to his or her work without publishing it in a top journal’.Footnote 19 There is, however, little evidence of leading political scientists seeking to publish significant scholarly work outside of the top journals.
The inadequacies of the traditional editorial and peer review system are a legacy of print technology. As manuscripts are increasingly made available on the web, open-online peer review is now feasible and even desirable for certain types of publication. It is not hard to imagine a continuum of publication, necessitating a continuum of peer review, each stage providing different levels of feedback as a piece of research develops into a formal journal article.Footnote 20 The end result may well be fewer research articles and more research notes, reflecting more differentiation and a new hierarchy of weight and status in the literature.
Information overload is a problem for authors, whose demands for islands of filtered information will increase as the ocean of scholarship expands. New forms of peer review in different levels of publication could well help to promote more efficient filtering and to decrease the load on editors, but only in so far as they might provide early signalling as to the quality of an article and assist in identifying appropriate reviewers.
Libraries
The role of the library is changing. The nature of the problem is described by Hazen thus: ‘The immense range of materials available through Google has also shifted the value calculus by which we have traditionally judged our largest library collections. Libraries, along with other agencies devoted to our intellectual and cultural heritage, are experiencing a dual crisis of purpose and identity’.Footnote 21 The scale of the available information easily exceeds the capacity of any single institution. The expanding array of information resources, in all formats, is magnified by intense price pressures that have consistently outpaced inflation. Books and periodicals typically consume only a quarter to a third of total library spending, yet the budgetary constraints on them are enormous.Footnote 22
The aggregation of online titles into packages has dramatically changed the sales landscape in recent years. Large publisher conglomerates wield oligopolistic control over certain market segments – particularly the Science, Technical and Medical (STM) market – and increasingly in the Social Sciences too. Aggregation is likely to continue on the supply side as e-books, reference works and datasets are added to offerings. Such packages are commonly referred to as the ‘Big Deal’, whereby publishers bundle together all their content into a single all-or-nothing package, for sale to consortia. The price of a package typically reflects the value of existing print subscriptions within the purchasing consortium, to which is added a top-up fee for electronic access to previously non-subscribed titles.
On the one hand, these packages widen access, decrease uncertainty via caps on annual price rises and reduce the average cost per subscription to consortium members. On the other hand, many publishers, particularly larger commercial houses, offer their packages on an inflexible, take-it-or-leave-it basis. The ability of librarians to exercise choice is therefore limited, as there is often little scope for unsubscribing to particular titles or for creating smaller, customized bundles out of the larger package. These publishers are thus able to command even bigger slices of consortia budgets; and new journals and mature titles from smaller publishers are crowded out of the market.
In the face of escalating costs, libraries are increasingly turning to collective action to reshape the marketplace. There is a compelling logic to operating collectively as purchasers of content and to extending the idea of inter-library loan to digital collections. It is surely only institutional inertia and the particular preferences of librarians that might explain why progress in this area has not been more rapid. Indeed, co-operative and collaborative activities may be essential to libraries wishing to broaden their services and content – they will increase efficiencies, reduce duplication and optimize the use and reach of scarce resources. And they may become increasingly important if the oligopolistic power of the dominant commercial players is to be effectively confronted.
How will libraries cope with the tidal wave of new materials? As they shift away from storehouses of print products, libraries will be called upon to provide search engines that are more revealing of content, and tools that can work across large sets of sources and data in useful and predictable ways. Scholarship requires constant access to enduring content, requiring libraries to play a role in policing notoriously unstable web sources that expand, change, move around and even disappear.
Publishers
Boundaries are also being redrawn for publishing firms. Collaborating with others is easier and less expensive, and the linking of operations is facilitated by new online editorial management and peer review systems. Investment in hardware and software, while often high, is relatively small compared to investment in new business processes, new products and employee training, all of which have ushered in large advances in productivity.Footnote 23 Part of the work has been transferred from publisher to author; what remains is often outsourced to more cost-effective suppliers offshore. Meanwhile much marketing occurs via email. These are measurable savings as information moves more quickly and efficiently across points.
Geographical boundaries too are shifting, as more products from typesetting to copy-editing to printing are being sourced globally, allowing for new ideas and competition to emerge in new markets. And publishing companies can now exploit knowledge about existing customers more effectively. Suppliers and customers are able to see inside the machine, exposing weaknesses and inefficiencies. The internet should make pricing and internal processes more transparent, but not in scholarly publishing where aggregation and the ‘Big Deal’ have led to a more opaque and inflexible market, decreasing competition and increasing the pricing power of some publishers.
That this has not happened in scholarly publishing is a direct result of the perverse incentive system described above. It has not, however, stopped publishers from innovating. They have been at the forefront of advances in online functionality, in the development and customization of editorial management and peer review systems, in the provision of new sales models and the aggregation of content, and in more targeted marketing and sales techniques. In so doing, publishers have added extra value to their journals and have demonstrated the key role that they play in the production and dissemination of knowledge.
The establishment of CrossRef in 1999 is perhaps the best recent example of publisher collaboration and innovation in the digital environment.Footnote 24 It is a reference linking service that functions as a kind of digital switchboard by effecting linkages through Digital Object Identifiers (doi) which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. The end result is a highly efficient, scalable system that provides a backbone linking citations for all scholarly information in digital form. CrossRef was achieved by the world’s leading publishers joining together to form a non-profit, independent service with the express aim of providing a uniform approach to identifying and discovering data. It currently comprises over 2,900 publishers and 20,000 journal titles with more than 40 million records, 87% of which are from scholarly journals.Footnote 25
By ensuring that all the key elements of the text are consistently and systematically structured, publishers facilitate the discoverability of scholarly material, significantly improving the process of scholarly research and helping to create a measure of order out of the chaos that the exponential growth of material promises. The digitization of journal backfiles, frequently beginning with the first published issue, is another example of publisher innovation which has greatly increased the accessibility of scholarship and learning. The doors have been opened to journal material, sometimes going back as far as the early 1800s, which might well have remained closed in the absence of the investment and project-management skills provided by publishers.
The onus is on publishers and editors to collaborate in projecting the unique personality of a journal and to take full advantage of the quasi-monopoly power that derives from it. Publishers and learned societies must find discriminating editors and then provide them with the necessary support. Outstanding editors are rare; it is they, who, in their treatment and selection of articles, determine the personality of the journal. They must be properly resourced so that they can network, select and shape articles to reflect that personality. Once the manuscript has been accepted and interaction with the editors has been completed, everything else, subject to resource constraints, should be the business of copy editors, managing editors and publishers.
Publishers must differentiate their products in a manner not easily imitated by competitors, and which is valued by authors, editors, readers and libraries. This may take the form of a strong brand, a technology edge, an inventive sales model, good visibility, accomplished copy-editing, and proficient editors – all the factors generating loyalty and custom. Despite the blurring of the traditional roles of creators, suppliers and distributors, no one is better placed than publishers to provide these services. They have the broad knowledge of the industry, the entrepreneurial skills and the necessary detachment from the research process to add genuine value to scholarship. In a digital environment, everyone can put material onto the internet; but this is quite different to being published, where material is filtered – the real value added of publishing – shaped and marketed, providing an output that is validated and trustworthy.
Conclusion
Despite the pervasive impact of the internet revolution and the radical change it is generating, there is much that will remain the same. The dissemination function of journals is being undermined; but journals will continue to play a vital role in the ownership of ideas, ensuring quality and providing a fixed archival version of reference. Authors will continue to publish in research journals as long as institutions continue to rely heavily on their output and services to inform research funding and academic advancement. High circulation journals will continue to exist in print and electronic versions for the foreseeable future – particularly where it is a key benefit of membership of a learned society. Low-circulation, high-cost journals that make up the bulk of the scholarly publishing market will in future surely exist only electronically sometime within the next decade.
Scholars have no incentive to maintain the current journal system, but they currently have little incentive to dismantle it.Footnote 26 There are too many perverse incentives in the system and there is unlikely to be any dramatic change till the costs and tradeoffs are clearer and better aligned between users and producers. Inefficient institutions have a habit of enduring for a long time. Unless the interests of key players are threatened, sociological changes in the scholarly arena tend to be a casualty of inertia and the costs of transition.
Library spending will not grow in the present economic climate. Yet there appears to be a need for more journals, particularly in political science, indicating a key area of stress. In another industry, relief would come in the form of price adjustments and new entries. But the usual rules do not apply to scholarly journals. Digitization may have created a world in which anyone can be a publisher and the cost of entry for new journals is ostensibly low. However, rigidities in the publishing industry – in particular, oligopolistic pricing and inflexible sales models that go with the bundling of titles for sale to consortia – act to impede the flowering of new titles outside of an established bundle.
Within the broader system of scholarly communication informal elements will play a more important role. The distinctions may be blurring between the informal and formal sectors for some subjects areas, but it is hard to see that happening in political science. The tools and infrastructure for informal publishing – including the web pages of individual authors and institutional repositories – tend to be inwardly focused; and preprint archives, while a convenient way to share results, lack the mechanisms to certify and authorize the research. In the process of disseminating research, they are likely to remain the foothills on the journey to the summit, represented by the best of the general journals.
For BJPolS and other leading journals, it will continue to be a question of authority. In the face of a flood of both formal and informal content, it is crucial that branded peer-reviewed journals, in choosing what merits publication, continue to offer quality controls to institutions, authors, readers, foundations and funding bodies. The journal article will remain the final destination and the singular version of record for a piece of research. The pathways to the destination will simply become richer and more varied; it is here that the power and possibilities of the internet will continue to grow.Footnote 27
The landscape of information, scholarship, technology and academic organizations is in flux. Solutions will emerge opportunistically, and there are doubtless many surprises in store, determined by technological change, corporate alliances, institutional decisions regarding standards and, above all, consumer choice. Publishers with a distinctive sense of what the business is about will need to adapt accordingly, but without losing sight of the principal scholarly goals and public purpose that the research serves.
