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The fundamental asymmetries of the journal system are reviewed and an examination is made of the differences between author and reader behaviour at both a quantitative and a qualitative level. Author productivity and so‐called “salami‐style” publishing practices are examined. An estimate of global author numbers is made. Reader and readership studies combined with bibliometric analysis allow the proposal of a means of estimating reading rates of journals.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the migration from the print world to the electronic environment has affected the motivations, attitudes and behaviours of researchers in scholarly communication.

The paper takes the form of an investigation that is both quantitative and qualitative. The study was split into three phases: understand the issues affecting researchers (focus groups and interviews); an online survey of 6,344 researchers measuring attitudes and digging deeper into issues: telephone interviews to understand differences between different groups change. Differences in opinions were examined across discipline.

While there has been some change in the behaviour of researchers, there has been little change in their motivations for publication. Researchers want other researchers' data but are less inclined to share their own. Researcher attitudes towards repositories are very mixed. Researchers highly value peer review. The pressure to over‐publish at the expense of quality is exaggerated.

Further research is required to measure the impact on researcher motivations and attitudes of external pressures that were emerging at the time of this study. This includes the growing influence of funding bodies, the economic downturn and its impact on institutional budgets, as well as subsequent advances in the digital revolution.

This research suggests that, while technology may have positively impacted the efficiency of scholarly communication, the drivers behind scholarly information exchange remain relatively unchanged. Moreover, changes to the scholarly information business model will only be successful if they continue to satisfy the underlying motivations and needs of researchers.

This paper fulfils an identified need to measure the motivations of researchers towards the core functions of scholarly communication on a global level.

Excited by what has now become possible, paricipants in the creation of the new digital library often overlook fundamental (often implicit) aspects of the paper paradigm that still need to be maintained in the digital universe. In the realm of scholarly and sxientific communication, ths issues of first publication, version control, referencing version control, referncing, stable and immutable archives, as well as strategic issues blurring the distinctions between the information players all have to be reconsidered. These matters are reviewed with an indication of what has and has yet to be achieved

The aim is to distil the knowledge gained in 10 years of editing ILDS and 35 years in the business.

Factors affecting the change in demand for ILL are considered as well as the reasons for variation between countries.

The finding is that ILL has an optimistic future.

The article provides an overview from the retiring editor of ILDS.

This paper provides a high‐level overview of some of the main research themes and preoccupations that are reported in this special ciber issue of Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives. The research activities of ciber are drawn together in the quest for a better understanding of the policy implications of large‐scale knowledge production systems against the backdrop of profound technical change, uncertainty over business models, and new forms of consumer behaviour. The paper presents a series of conceptual frameworks that aim to contextualise ciber’s work in bibliometrics, cybermetrics, research evaluation, scholarly communication, user studies, publishing strategies and policy analysis. The transparency that metrics can bring to the evaluation debate and the pivotal role of human information behaviour in determining those metrics, are discussed.

Reviews recent interlending and document supply literature. Considers the implications of open accesss archiving and the ongoing developments in consortia and electronic journals. A number of other issues are reviewed briefly.

The author gives an overview of the annual meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing and outlines the highlights of some of the sessions, including the keynote addresses on how the law and technology can affect scholarly publishing in the digital age, and research on how engineers communicate. Notes that the session on researcher perspectives on publishing was a personal highlight of the meeting, which was held in San Francisco.