Driven to near despair by the ever increasing cost of scholarship, particularly the growing expense of scientific journal subscriptions, Mary Case and I, way back in 1998, wrote an article for Notices of the American Mathematical Society with the highfalutin title of " Reforming Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences. " In it we argued that scientists, working with librarians and professional soc...

Internet growth seems to amplify the critiques to peer review mechanism: many researchers maintain that Internet would allow a more fast, elastic, interactive, and effective model of publishing. I propose a new kind of electronic scholarly journal, with the aim of changing the submission-review-publication process. The new electronic scholarly journal is described in both intuitive and formal w...

Key stakeholders in scholarly communication have been at odds over the purpose, mission and business models of publishing. This piece reviews developments in the United States but with a particular focus on efforts at reestablishing common purpose, such as (1) the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable created in June 2009 by the Chairman of Science and Technology Committee of the US House of Represen...

Technological advances such as web-based peer review and powerful desktop publishing software have reduced the resources needed to operate a scholarly journal making it feasible for small societies or other groups of scholars to publish high quality journals without large capital investments. The transition to digital media has also largely eliminated the marginal cost of disseminating each cop...