But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access

Abstract

We discuss our experience in both commercial and open-access publishing. We argue that, in the papyrocentric (paper-centered) era before 1990, commercial publishers served a useful and necessary purpose. In the electronic era, post 2000, the academy has very little to gain from commercial publishers, who may actually impede rather than facilitate scholarly communication. We consider the costs of running an open-access journal and argue that they are considerably less than is commonly supposed. We describe the role of workflow and content-management software systems and how they can facilitate not only open-access journals, but also working-paper series, conference organization, scholarly societies, and other forms of scholarly communication.