Blog to the Future? Journals Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

• Published in: Journal of scholarly publishing Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 16 - 30
• Main Author: Phillips, Angus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: North York, ON University of Toronto Press 01.10.2010
• Subjects: Blogs; Business models; Economic aspects : information market, information industry; Exact sciences and technology; Information and communication sciences; Information economics. Information policy; Information science. Documentation; Library and information science. General aspects; Open access publishing; Sciences and techniques of general use; Publishing; Economic model; Periodical; Blog; Open access; Information market
• ISSN: 1198-9742; 1710-1166
• DOI: 10.3138/jsp.42.1.16

A variety of current developments are creating questions over present models of publishing and scholarly communication. Will new journals continue to be launched? Will open-access developments such as subject or institutional repositories reach a tipping point at which libraries will start to cancel journal subscriptions? Is the journal article too static a mechanism, by comparison to the ways in which scholars are able to interact using blogs and wikis? Steadily emerging is a new future for the journal as part of an overall network of knowledge creation and scholarly communication. We are moving away from a world in which a few producers generate content to transmit to a set of users. Instead, the world of knowledge creation has a variety of routes through which research can be disseminated and feedback mechanisms facilitated by a range of collaborative tools.