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This study surveys the landscape of scholarly publishing, with particular emphasis on scholarly journals in the communication discipline, measuring the shift to electronic publishing in six selected disciplines and exploring two other important emerging topics: open-access publishing and new journal citation metrics. The goals are to inform communication researchers about emerging topics in scholarly publishing; to provide updated information about the proportion of electronic-only journals; to compare the impact of electronic-only journals and open-access journals to other journals in the same discipline; and to provide a list of communication journals showing each journal’s Impact Factor, open-access status, and other information relevant to researchers’ decisions about publication venue.

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A census of prestige journals (those included in the ISI's Journal Citation Reports) in six fields (business, communication, geology, meteorology, physiology, and social psychology) showed that 97% of journals in those fields in 2008 were in transition between print and electronic. Two percent were distributed only in print; one percent was distributed in electronic format only. Electronic-only journals had a higher reputational value than print-only journals. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a native electronic-only journal, had the fourth-highest reputational value among communication journals and had the highest reputational value among all electronic-only journals examined. Strong emerging trends in the sciences for eliminating print copies of journals are noted.