PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY JOURNALS, A CHANGE IN THE LANDSCAPE?

Scientific journals form the largest part of the geoscience information landscape. Professional societies were the progenitors of much of the geoscience literature, but over time, some societies have moved their journals to commercial publishers. Other societies used commercial publishers to start new journals for them. There has been a recent increase in the move of society journals to commercial publishers. Sometimes a society decides that its journal needs better visibility through all the Web resources and marketing capabilities of a commercial publisher. Perhaps the move provides financial benefits for the society. The change can reduce some library subscriptions, because the price of the moved journal may increase substantially. On the other hand, some libraries may obtain new access to the journal through automatic inclusion in one of the library’s e-journal packages

This study identifies geoscience and other scientific society journals that have moved to commercial publishers. Journal prefaces and editorials, publisher newsletters, and announcements were examined to determine the reasons for moving specific journals to commercial publishers. Then the effect of the change in publisher was gauged through price histories, changes in library holdings, changes in journal impact measurements, and citation patterns. What is the impact of a shift of journal publishing from society to commercial publishers?