The Growth of Journals Publishing

For the last 60 years, scholarly journals have witnessed unprecedented growth, controversy and change. Since the late 1940s, the number of scholarly journals has increased sharply, with hundreds of new titles and new topics being introduced each decade. Beginning in the late 1960s and especially since the 1990s, the form of journals has been transformed into digital versions that speed both access and delivery of articles to readers and provide enhanced functionality. E-journals are now more popular with libraries and readers than their print counterparts, although both forms continue to coexist for a majority of titles. This combination of more titles and more widespread availability in both print and electronic formats has engendered lively debates in the library, publishing and scholarly communities, and has kept scholarly journals at the forefront in discussions of the promise and problems with traditional forms of scholarly communication channels