Scholarly Journals in the New Digital World

Alexander Craig is a freelance journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec.

“Digital periodicals? We’ll have to get used to reading and using
them, but at least they’ll be cheaper, they’ll surely break the
near-monopoly big commercial publishers have on the
exponentially-growing prices of academic journals.”

If only … For a more likely scenario, you should consult this
substantially footnoted translation of a work by two experts from the
Université de Montreal—a political scientist and library specialist,
respectively—which draws on their extensive interaction with
specialists in the field from France and the United States, as well as
Quebec and Canada.

A large part of their work is on cost, and they show how expensive the
setting up (whether conventional print or digital) of the initial copy
can be (subsequent costs are relatively marginal). Other parts of their
wide-ranging study focus on dissemination, marketing, and editing, among
other topics.

What is the role of the publisher? What do you do about your rates of
subscription? Should you move to digital-only? A great deal remains to
be done (redefinition of working methods, identifying new publishing
tasks, etc.), and this book, which would have benefited from the
inclusion of an index, offers some useful guidelines.