thumb|Scientific and technical journal publications per million residents of the world as of 2020
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary, and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as the field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research differ greatly among fields and subfields. In the sciences, the desire for statistically significant results leads to publication bias.
Academic publishing is undergoing major changes as it makes the transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources, particularly journals, has been very common. An important trend, particularly with respect to journals in the sciences, is open access via the Internet. In open access publishing, a journal article is made available free for all on the web by the publisher at the time of publication.
Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the author paying an article processing charge, thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their funder. Many open or closed journals fund their operations without such fees and others use them in predatory publishing. The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving, in which authors themselves make a copy of their published articles available free for all on the web. Some important results in mathematics have been published only on arXiv.
History
The (later spelled ), established by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for a new discovery to be announced as a monograph, reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton, a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th century, 59% by the latter half of the 19th century, and 33% by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals, with estimates suggesting that around 50 million journal articles
The COVID-19 pandemic hijacked the entire world of basic and clinical science, with unprecedented shifts in funding priorities worldwide and a boom in medical publishing, accompanied by an unprecedented increase in the number of publications. Preprint servers became much more popular during the pandemic, and the Covid situation also had an impact on traditional peer-review. The pandemic has also deepened the concentration of science-publishing in Western countries. Of the authors of papers published about COVID-19 before August 2021, nearly were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain.
Publishers and business aspects
In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers began to selectively acquire "top-quality" journals that were previously published by nonprofit academic societies. When the commercial publishers raised the subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due to the inelastic demand for these journals. Although there are over 2,000 publishers, five for-profit companies (Reed Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE) accounted for 50% of articles published in 2013. (Since 2013, Springer Science+Business Media has undergone a merger to form an even bigger company named Springer Nature.) Available data indicate that these companies have profit margins of around 40% making it one of the most profitable industries, especially compared to the smaller publishers, which likely operate with low margins.
Crisis
A crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived"; In the 2010s, libraries began more aggressive cost cutting with the leverage of open access and open data. Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier.
Academic journal publishing reform
Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-oriented features. This is particularly true for the most popular journals where the number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing. Due to this, many academics self-archive a 'preprint' or 'postprint' copy of their paper for free download from their personal or institutional website.
<noinclude>Some journals, particularly newer ones, are now published in electronic form only. Paper journals are now generally made available in electronic form as well, both to individual subscribers, and to libraries. Almost always these electronic versions are available to subscribers immediately upon publication of the paper version, or even before; sometimes they are also made available to non-subscribers, either immediately (by open access journals) or after an embargo of anywhere from two to twenty-four months or more, in order to protect against loss of subscriptions. Journals having this delayed availability are sometimes called delayed open access journals. Ellison in 2011 reported that in economics the dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles.
- Research paper
- Case report or Case series
- Position paper
- Review article or Survey paper
- Species paper
- Technical paper
Note: Law review is the generic term for a journal of legal scholarship in the United States, often operating by rules radically different from those for most other academic journals.
Peer review
Peer review is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication. A group of experts reviews the manuscript regarding its originality, correctness, and relevance. A secondary benefit of the process is an indirect guard against plagiarism since reviewers are usually familiar with the sources consulted by the author(s). The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to 1752 when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility for Philosophical Transactions. However, there were some earlier examples.
While journal editors largely agree the system is essential to quality control in terms of rejecting poor quality work, there have been examples of important results that are turned down by one journal before being taken to others. Rena Steinzor wrote: