The history of academic publishing begins in 1665 when Henry Oldenburg started Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and Denis de Sallo, in France, published the first volume of the first print journal called Journal des Scavens on January 5, 1665(Nikam and Babu H. 2009). The rise of discipline-oriented scholarly journals results from “The fragmentation of knowledge into more specialised disciplines” (Day 1999), which is perhaps the first evolution of scholarly communication in relation to academic publishing. In 19th century, journals began to assume the functions of registering “ownership” and establishing “priority” over a particular innovation (Guedon 2001) and the publication of articles in journals becomes the primary “indicator of professional standing for researchers”(Correia and Teixeira 2005:13-14). As a result, peer review becomes the central assessment system in gate-keeping of academic publishing, which could be regarded as another big change in the history of academic publishing. In print age, academic publishing has established the following traditional functions to meet the scholarly requirements: author evaluation, author recognition, validation of knowledge and quality control, historical record, and archival (Correia and Teixeira 2005).

After World War II, “the nature of research has evolved, from specialised to interdisciplinary” (Correia and Teixeira 2005:351). Accordingly, scholars need more efficient and cost-saving access to a wide range of literature in different disciplines as well as cross-citation and cross-referencing. But academic publishing system did not deal with such information explosion successfully due to the “increasing publishing costs”, “delays in publishing”, “distribution inefficiencies”, and so forth, which led to the “serials crisis” (Large, Tedd et al. 1999; Tenopir and King 2000).Such a crisis has not been dealt with properly until the introduction of electronic publishing technology in 1980s. The evolution leveraged by electronic publishing not only solved the problem of the “data deluge” (Hey and Trefethen 2003), along with the expansion of universities as well as scientific documents; but also, made scholarship more searchable, visible, and efficient in distribution with the emergence of electronic database of bibliographic information (Large, Tedd et al. 1999; Correia and Teixeira 2005). The evolution of electronic publishing forms the basic structure of today’s academic publishing models, both commercial and communicative, which are still influential and dominant.

In later 1990s, the rise of ICTs, particularly the “rapid evolution of digital and networking technologies” (Brown, Griffiths et al. 2007:3) transformed text to e-text and net-text, which revolutionizes publishing industry in terms of technology, business models,  product/service concept, user behaviour,  copyright, and demography, etc (ibid, 4-5). Meanwhile, new research practice in the 21^st century such as e-research, e-science, and Science 2.0 requires “new forms of data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, collaborative, multi-, inter-, or cross-disciplinary scholarship” (Borgman 2007:31). In other words, scholars need speedy and efficient dissemination of new knowledge, broad and cheap access to most valuable scholarship, and much convenience and infinite possibility to generate, share, use, reuse, discuss and collectively update the scholarly materials. As a result, new publishing models and innovative experiments have been launched.

Guthrie (2008:1) uses “online academic resources” (OARs) to define “content and scholarly discourses available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching”, which includes scholarly journals and monographs, new emerging formats to disseminate scholarship such as preprint and wikis, and digital collection of primary source materials. Maron (2009) identifies eight principal types of “digital scholarly resources” in what they called “digital scholarly communication”, namely, E-only journals, reviews, preprints and working papers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, annotated data, blogs, discussion forums, and professional and scholarly hubs. Despite the variety of these new digital academic publishing platforms, the central themes of digital academic publishing today is Open Access, which democratizes knowledge by a wide extension of the circulation of scholarship and  is leading to the forthcoming evolution (Correia and Teixeira 2005). 

The history of academic publishing is virtually a socio-technological evolution driven by both technological capacity and the social changes of academic contexts, which is neither technological determinism nor social determinism. Some social studies on digital academic publishing follow the paradigm of “social informatics” to analyse the sociol-technological evolution in academic publishing, particularly the social aspects of ICTs in academia. Just as Kling (2005:6) argues, “Social Informatics refers to the interdisciplinary study” of “interaction with institutional and cultural contexts” and ICTs. These studies tend to contextualise technology and examine the contextual dynamics, drivers, or constraints in relation to technological advances. 

The primary driver they identify is the scholarly unsatisfied demands in academic publishing. As a result, the innovative academic publishing platforms newly launched are per se stakeholders’ responses to the unsatisfactory features of traditional academic publishing, which facilitate a wider distribution of scholarship, ranging from “a comprehensive reorganization of the scholarly communication” to better ways of accomplishing the current functions (Borgman 2007:75). For example, they are open access based, non-for-profit, niche-oriented, informal, cross-disciplinary, rich media, cross-platforms, and so forth (Lagoze 2005; King, Harley et al. 2006; Borgman 2007; Guthrie, Griffiths et al. 2008; Maron and Smith 2009; Nikam and Babu H. 2009).

Some scholars follow a political economy approach and point out that such a digital revolution is also driven by “business and commercial interests” (Watson 2004:254). As a result, the uses of digital technology not only enhance “essential aspects of scholarship”, but also balance or rebalance “the interests of the many stakeholders” (Borgman 2007:75-76) in the value chain. Just as Borgman (2007:9) further argues, “authors, libraries, universities, and publishers are wrestling with the trade-offs between traditional forms of publisher-controlled dissemination and author or institution-controlled forms of open access publishing”. Obviously Information Communication Technology (ICT) makes it possible for non-publisher actors, particularly research institutes, to enter academic publishing fields and do publishing business. It is thus the time for universities, universities presses, and libraries to reassess and redefine their role in the overall scholarly communication frameworks (Steele 2008) (Houghton, Steele et al. 2006). In-fact these alternative publishing platforms, especially Institutional Repositories (IR) is much less commercialised and utilitarian compared with commercial publishers and thus are the “best way to provide access to scientific research output” (Nikam and Babu H. 2009). In other words,  “[d]igital technologies would result in disintermediation of the value chain” (Tian and Martin 2009:75)and restructure the academic publishing industry. There is a potential risk for publishers that their role of intermediaries might be replaced by a direct interaction between faculty and libraries in future due to the capability attributed to ICTs. But at present, commercial publishers’ role is still dominant while new innovative platforms remain at the stage of experiments. 

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