The approaching economic environment

The already existing and future economic atmosphere will significantly affect scientific publishing during the next several years. Distributors and retailers are joining what was essentially a one-component (i.e., the publisher-manufacturer) industry. The original product (the journal or book) is spawning a wide variety of secondary, derivative, and aftermarket information products. It is becoming possible to deal in machine-readable information equivalents, e.g., a scientist´s current workbook entries, rather than with a post-experiment journal paper describing the research.