The journal plays a central role in scholarly communication. Its core functions of registration, certification, dissemination, archiving, and rewarding have remained intact so far across the online transition and the exploration of new publishing models like open access. Peer review is critical to the journal, and remains widely supported despite some robust criticism. New technologies have the potential radically to reimagine the online journal, but conservative scholarly communication behaviors suggest that future innovation will be evolutionary rather than disruptive.

This plenary session at UKSG presented the new portfolio of research projects focused on gaps in access, the dynamics of improving access to research papers and transitions to electronic-only publication. This work is funded by the Research Information Network (RIN), JISC, Publishing Research Consortium (PRC),Wellcome Trust and Research Libraries UK (RLUK). Ian Rowlands’ presentation focused on access gaps and barriers for scholarly content, and was based on a survey of 20,000 users of journal articles and conference papers in universities and colleges; medical schools and health providers; industry and commerce; and research institutes. Mark Ware considered how such gaps in access might best be addressed, based on a study which compared five possible routes: open access journals (gold OA); open access repositories (green OA); delayed access; extensions to licensing; and transactional solutions (such as pay-per-view). Laura Cox presented a study which looked specifically at the obstacles to exclusively online journal provision from the perspectives of libraries, academia and journal publishing, and gave recommendations for how they might be overcome.The full reports on all three studies will be available from the RIN website, but the Editors of Serials have asked the presenters to provide brief summaries of their work for those who were unable to attend the conference.

We report on a research study commissioned by ALPSP into the factors affecting journal cancellations and, in particular, on the impact of the free availability of journal articles via open access repositories.

We examine the ways in which Web 2.0 tools and services – including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and tag ging, social networking and data interoperability and re-use – are affecting scholarly communication, with examples and usage data where available. We find that many of the tools have yet to live up to their early promise and the expectations that rode on them, and discuss the possible reasons for this. This article is about the impact of Web 2.0 on scholarly communication, and the reader might therefore reasonably ask for our definition of Web 2.0. Given the widespread coverage it has had in virtually all media, it feels a bit superfluous to attempt another definition but the conventions of authorship require me to provide something. JISC in a 2007 report defined it thus: " Web 2.0 encompasses a variety of different meanings that include an increased emphasis on user-generated content, data and content sharing and collaborative effort, together with the use of various kinds of social software, new ways of interacting with web-based applications, and the use of the web as a platform for generating, re-purposing and consuming content. " This may be accurate and comprehensive but is like many such definitions unhelpful if you do not already have a good idea of what's being talked about. In practice, I am working on the assumption that readers of this article will already their own idea of Web 2.0 (and a pretty good one too) to which we can apply the elephant test: it is difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it. 1 This may become clearer as we progress to specific examples but let me, however, clarify our definition by drawing attention to two (non-exclusive) flavours of Web 2.0: social applications (such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking) with their emphasis on explicit and implicit user-generated content, and data applications such as data mashups in which the web is treated as a computing platform for combining and re-using data in new ways. The distinction is not always clear and furthermore data applications will increasingly tend to overlap with the semantic web (sometimes called Web 3.0, though that label is also unhelpfully applied to other developments, such as 3D or immersive interfaces). No matter. The labels are here to help rather than hinder and we can cheerfully proceed without further theological distinctions. But before moving on to …