Scholarly Publishing’s Evolving Landscape

Abstract

This study surveys the landscape of scholarly publishing, with particular emphasis on scholarly journals in the communication discipline, measuring the shift to electronic publishing in six selected disciplines and exploring two other important emerging topics: open-access publishing and new journal citation metrics. The goals are to inform communication researchers about emerging topics in scholarly publishing; to provide updated information about the proportion of electronic-only journals; to compare the impact of electronic-only journals and open-access journals to other journals in the same discipline; and to provide a list of communication journals showing each journal’s Impact Factor, open-access status, and other information relevant to researchers’ decisions about publication venue.