Who publishes the journals that you read and publish in?

Knowing a bit about journal publishing helps authors to see their contribution in a context since authors are affected by the policies adopted by publishers of journals. Take the matter of page charges, for example: it has been a long-standing practice of many American journals to charge the authors for papers; however, it used to be clearly understood that authors’ willingness to pay these charges had nothing to do with the acceptance of a paper. ‘Predatory’ journals differ in this aspect in that they virtually guarantee that a paper submitted to them will be published – and published fast – provided its authors pay a fee.

So, who are the publishers of scientific, technical, and medical journals, or STM journals, as they are known in the publishing trade? And why do they publish? The top five STM publishers in terms of the number of journals they publish are Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell Publishing, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis—all of them commercial publishers, who run journal publishing as a business and expect to run the business profitably. Each of these publishers publishes at least several hundred journals.

The second category of such publishers consists of learned societies. Publishing a journal is one of the activities of such societies: most of such societies publish only one journal or at the most a few journals, although the largest such society, namely, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, publishes close to a hundred journals. It is also common for a society to outsource the major non-content-related operations such as printing and distribution to a commercial publisher while retaining editorial control over such matters as the scope of the journal and the reviewing process. The societies are motivated mainly by the desire to spread knowledge about a given field and to report on current advances. Profit is not the main motive although it is certainly important to ensure that publishing a journal is not a loss-making venture. The revenue of any such society comes mainly from membership dues or fees, and bulk of the journal’s circulation is accounted for by the list of members.

The last category comprises university presses. Large university presses such as Oxford University Press and the University of Chicago Press also publish dozens of journals and may be closer to commercial publishers in terms of the scale of their operations but differ sharply in that the university presses are not motivated by profits; in fact, the charter of many such presses explicitly forbids them from being profit-making commercial operations.

I hope this brief overview will help fill in some gaps in seeing the larger picture of journal publishing.