Rear Vision explores why the world of scholarly communication has become so divided over the control, access and cost of knowledge. The outsourcing of the production of the Medical journal of Australia has divided medical researchers because of the sacking of the editor in chief, Professor Stephen Leeder. At the centre of the controversy is...

Foreword A few days ago, we were speaking with an ecologist from Simon Fraser University here in Vancouver about an unsolicited job offer he’d recently received. The offer included an astonishing inducement: Anyone from his to-be-created lab who could wangle a first or corresponding authorship of a Nature paper would receive a bonus of $100,000...

It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and academic libraries...

This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.

STM publishing takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication, which includes both formal and informal elements. Scholarly communication plays different roles at different stages of the research cycle, and (like publishing) is undergoing technology-driven change. Categorising the modes of communication into one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, and then into oral and written, provides a...