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The paper explores the relationship between economics and scientific journal publishing in a number of areas by: establishing the fact, neglected by some librarians, that the “serials crisis” is not exclusively a plague infecting the STM sector, but that economics too has been badly affected; providing a more disaggregated analysis of the market power exerted by the dominant commercial publisher in economics journal publishing; considering briefly three academic‐led experiments aimed at improving scholarly communication in economics; comparing the policy stance taken by the UK Competition Commission on scientific publishing and on banking for small businesses in two recent reports and exposing its glaring inconsistency; and suggesting a modest proposal to remedy some of the inefficiencies identified in this paper.

The ELectronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS) envisages a new concept of scholarly and scientific journal: conceived and managed by academics themselves; aimed at providing direct competition to high‐priced commercial publications; based on a business model whereby subscription revenues cover the non‐trivial cost of peer‐review; designed to maximise research productivity; intended as a platform for scientific and scholarly debate. The ELSSS model conceives the peer‐reviewed published article not at the final stage of the scholarly communication chain, but as an intermediate step, to be followed by Web‐based interaction among self‐selected networks of interested researchers. The paper suggests that the very concepts of “lending” and “document” need redefining in the case of the forthcoming generation academic‐led journals.