Everything you wanted to know about journals

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers has published, The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, a follow-up to their 2006 report, Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments.
I’m not the biggest fan of this publishers’ organisation, but I think this is a useful report for anyone interested in journals. The press release says that the report “shows that scholarly communications are undergoing profound changes driven by technology and economic factors, while authors’ core motivations to publish remain stable”. Well, you probably knew that already, but it’s hard to give a one-line summary of a 68-page report.
Written by Mark Ware (of Mark Ware Consulting) and Michael Mabe (of stm) the report has a good overview of how journals and scholarly communication work, why researchers publish, the business side of journals, global trends in research publishing, reading patterns and navigation, ethical issues, open access, and new technology. In short, it is a scholarly review of just about everything that has happened in the journals world in the last three years. For anyone who follows these things there is little new, but it’s helpful to have it all in one place and the four page bibliography gives original sources for everything it covers.