Elsevier is moving towards electronic delivery of its full catalogue, funded by bulk subscriptions rather than pay-per-view, while everyone else is working on defining standards and working with funding bodies to provide open-access repositories of scientific papers. Elspeth Hyams reports from a number of recent conferences in Library Information Update.
So the journal as a portal to content at the right level and on the right subject plays an important filtering role, quite apart from any other value added by publishers (linking and metadata included)..... The truth is that the cost of publication, currently financed by publishers but paid for out of libraries’ budgets, is a very small part of the total budget of a piece of research.... the only way to change scholarly behaviour and to break the ‘stranglehold’ of the big-name subscription-only journals is to persuade funders that research grants must include the cost of funding publication.