Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or informationthe

activity of making information available to the general public. In some cases, authors may be their own publishers, meaning: originators and developers ofcontent also provide media to deliver and display the content for the same. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books (the "book trade") and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books and periodicals, as well as micropublishing, websites, blogs, video games and the like. Publishing includes the stages of the development, acquisition, copyediting, graphic design, production printing (and itselectronic equivalents), and marketing and distribution of newspapers, magazines, books, literary works, musical works,software and other works dealing with information, including the electronic media. Publication is also important as a legal concept:
1. As the process of giving formal notice to the world of a significant intention, for

example, to marry or enter bankruptcy; 2. As the essential precondition of being able to claim defamation; that is, the alleged libel must have been published, and 3. For copyright purposes, where there is a difference in the protection of published and unpublished works.

Publishing history

808 century The world's oldest known printed book, The Diamond Sutra, a seven-page scroll printed with wood blocks on paper, is produced in China. 11th The Chinese and Koreans continue to experiment with movable type, using clay, wood, bronze and iron. The complexity of Chinese and Korean symbols creates a major stumbling block to the process. 1440 German Johann Gutenberg invents movable type by developing foundry-cast metal characters and a wooden printing press. 1455 Gutenberg prints his first book, a Latin Bible. 1475 Englishman William Caxton produces the first book printed in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. 1559 Pope Paul IV issues the Index of Forbidden Books, which lists books the Roman Catholic Church considers dangerous to faith and morals.

1639 Stephen Day prints Freeman's Oath and An Almanack in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first books published in the American colonies. 1663 Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen (Edifying Monthly Discussions), considered the world's first magazine, is published in Germany. 1690 America's first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, is printed in Boston, Massachusetts, and subsequently suspended for operating without a royal license. 1731 The Gentleman's Magazine, considered the first modern magazine, is published in England. The periodical is intended for entertainment and includes essays, stories, poems and political commentary. 1741 Benjamin Franklin plans to publish America's first magazine, General Magazine, but is beaten to the punch when American Magazine comes out three days earlier. 1764 Pierre Fournier of France develops the point system to measure type sizes. His system is further refined by Francois Didot, establishing consistency in type measure throughout the world. 1771 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the first English-language encyclopedia, is published in Edinburgh, Scotland. 1793 The Pennsylvania Evening Post becomes America's first daily newspaper. 1796 German Alois Senefelder develops lithography, a method of image transfer that produces high-quality printed images. c. 1800 The Third Earl of Stanhope manufactures an all-metal printing press. 1810 In London, Friedrich Koenigh uses steam power to operate a printing press. His system involves rolling a cylinder over paper that lies on top of inked type. Koenigh's method signals the end of the flat-hand press. 1822 American-born William Church invents the first mechanical typesetting device. 1828 Noah Webster, often referred to as the father of his country's language, publishes the American Dictionary of the English Language in an attempt to encourage American independence in both written and spoken English. 1829 Encyclopaedia Americana, America's first encyclopedia, is published in Philadelphia. 1842 Illustrated London News uses woodcuts and engravings for the first time, prompting the growth of illustrated journals throughout the second half of the century.

1845 Paperbacks are introduced to the United States as newspaper supplements and soon appear as small-sized reprints of existing books. 1846 Richard Hoe patents the first rotary press, which allows publishers to increase circulation exponentially. 1851 Selling for a penny a copy, the New York Times debuts. 1861 The Chicago Times publicizes its motto: It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. 1891 The Copyright Act of 1891 prohibits the reprinting of English titles in paperback form, making paperbacks virtually nonexistent. William Morris establishes the Kelmscott Press to improve the quality of books produced in England. His books are known for their high quality illustrations and typography. 1895 In its first issue, American magazine The Bookman includes a list of Books in Demand, which predates the bestseller list, later developed by Frank Mott in his book, Golden Multitudes. 1902 McClure's Magazine prints Tweed Days in St. Louis by C.H. Wetmore and Lincoln Steffens. The article introduces the muckraking era. Beatrix Potter writes her first Peter Rabbit story. 1906 Upton Sinclair exposes the public-health threat of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle. 1912 Photoplay debuts as the first magazine for movie fans. 1913 First crossword puzzle appears in the New York World. See Crossword Puzzle Guide 1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes published. 1917 The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for editorial writing, reporting, history of the United States and biography or autobiography. Fiction, drama and poetry debut in 1918. The first op-ed page appears in the New York Times. 1921 Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence wins Pulitzer Prize. 1922 James Joyce's Ulysses published. The U.S. Post Office destroys 500 copies of the novel because it is considered obscene. Reader's Digest debuts. 1923

Time Magazine debuts. 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club is founded and begins to sell books at reduced prices by mail and on a subscription basis. 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead published. 1933 Esquire debuts as the first men's magazine. 1936 Allen Lane's Penguin Press, an English publishing house, reintroduces the paperback book. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind published. 1950 Charles Schulz introduces the Peanuts comic strip. 1953 The first issue of TV Guide magazine hits the newsstands on April 3 in 10 cities with a circulation of 1,560,000. Playboy magazine hits newsstands. A nude Marilyn Monroe graces the cover. 1956 Kay Thompson's Eloise, the Plaza Hotel's most famous guest, is a bestseller. Grace Metalious's steamy Peyton Place is a bestseller. 1967 Rolling Stone and New York Magazine debut, spawning the popularity of special-interest and regional magazines. 1972 Gloria Steinem's Ms magazine debuts. 1974 People magazine debuts, with Mia Farrow gracing the cover. 1980 About 70 percent of the books sold in the United States are paperbacks. 1985 With the availability of relatively inexpensive laser printers and computers, tools for desktop publishing begin to be commonly used. 1986 The Academic American Encyclopedia is available on CD-ROM. It is the first reference work published in this medium. 1989 Salman Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses is published and sparks immediate controversy. Islamic militants put a price on his head. 1990 Entertainment Weekly hits newsstands. 1994 For the first time in history, chain bookstores outsell independent stores, signaling what many fear to be the death of smaller booksellers at the hands of superstores.

Scholarly communication/publishing
Scholarly Communication refers to the process of scholars and researchers sharing information and publishing their research so that this knowledge is available to the academic and public community. Communication is the essence of scholarship; new scholarship builds upon ideas communicated by others, and derives its value through communication back to the community. Scholarship is an inherently social act, with an overarching purpose of advancing the pubic good. Accordingly, academic norms have always promoted open sharing of research findings and creative scholarship. This principled commitment to open scholarship has been bolstered over the past two decades by global advances in information technology that allow scholars to collaborate in real time when conducting research, as well as exercising greater control over how, when, and with whom their findings are shared. While open dissemination of university scholarship is well supported by institutional norms and information technology, there are countervailing market forces, legal strictures, and normative systems that impede sought after openness and operational efficiencies in scholarly communication. Some of the present-day challenges that beset scholarly communication include:

The high cost of scholarly journals The proliferation of scholarly output Inadequacy of peer review Restrictive access to published content Authors ceding to publishers control over their intellectual property Unduly restrictive copyright laws A lack of secure digital archiving strategies for the scholarly record A proliferation of ephemeral channels of scholarly discourse including email, blogs, webpages, etc. Limited public access to scholarly information, including taxpayer funded research A lack of adequate or respected output channels for scholarship in certain disciplines, or for new forms of research and scholarly expression that are not well represented in traditional text-based media Myriad challenges faced by university presses

While these challenges are most directly visited upon faculty, researchers, scholars, and graduate students, there is a growing unease among campus administratorsDeans, Library Directors, CIOs, Provosts, etc. that longstanding academic norms governing communication, and the management of the scholarly record, are under strain, and not necessarily in the control of our universities to repair. National and International Trends The advent of the Internet has caused the academy, scholars, scholarly societies, libraries, funding agencies, publishers and others to rethink their traditional roles in relation to scholarly

communication. Some of the more notable recent developments growing out of this recapitulation of roles in the ecology of scholarly communication are noted below: Open Access Journals Because open access journals are funded by author submission fees rather than reader subscriptions, their published articles can be made universally available. Some high prestige, high impact journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are open access titles, as are many traditional (hybrid) titles that offer authors the option of paying a publication fee so that their articles might be freely distributed to interested readers. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists over 7,000 open access journals Archiving MandatesThe faculties of some prestigious research universities including Harvard, MIT and Stanford have mandated that their colleagues deposit copies of their published articles in institutional or disciplinary repositories so they might be more accessible to interested scholars and readers, and securely archived for future generations. Likewise, several funding agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health have issued guidelines requiring deposit of taxpayer funded research publications in open repositories. More generally, many academics and taxpayer groups have urged Congressional action on the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373 and HR. 5037) which would require federal agencies with large external research funding programs to make funded research reports publicly accessible within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journals. Author Rights Most academic authors are not motivated by royalties to publish their research findings or ideas. Rather, most academic authors are motivated to publish as a means of sharing their ideas with other scholars and advancing the public good. Accordingly, these authors would best achieve their goals by the use of a Creative Commons License or anAuthors Addendum whereby authors retain a degree of control over the distribution of their intellectual property. Peer Review Peer review is valuable research practice in that it protects the public from dubious ideas and findings, and helps to recognize and reward desirable researcher characteristics such as creativity, relevance, rigor and clearly delineated opportunities for replication and validation. To a great extent, the job of organizing peer review has been outsourced to commercial publishing interests that use it to decide which articles are worthy of publication. By extension, these oft-times closed publishing decisions are also used as a basis for determining academic career success, i.e., decisions governing promotion and tenure. Increasingly, new methods of organizing peer review are attracting attention, especially systems of open post-publication peer review (OPR) which would arguably be more open, cost-effective, and in the control of academics than is the case with the current organization of peer review. Jobs of publisher ublishing seems like a simple business at its heart: an author writes a book, a publisher prints it, and a reader buys it. That apparent simplicity actually requires a lot of hard work and money. As just one example, to create film for printing, print, bind, and jacket a hardcover picture book can easily cost a publisher $25,000, not counting overhead, and their job isn't done (read more details in Why Does a Picture Book Cost $16?). Novels cost less. Art books cost more.

What does a publisher do? If you intend to self-publish, this is what you will have to do and who you will have to hire, unless you are happy to do no more than sell locally and to family and friends. As a self-publisher you have to compete in a national marketplace, head to head with the big publishing companies. It's possible to do that, but it takes time, money, knowledge of the market, and a carefully crafted strategy. If you are seeking a publisher, know that the following outlines what you can expect a publisher to do. acquisition--which is the right book to publish? Editorial staff may evaluate hundreds or even thousands of manuscripts annually to produce a "list" of 20 books. If you are self-publishing, how do you decide which of your books to do? Or if you have one, how do you know it can succeed? planning--what needs to be done to get this manuscript from draft to finished book? Once a publisher decides a book is going to be published, everything has to be coordinated so that books get out into the market when the company said they would. At a publisher, a managing editor keeps track of what everyone is doing. If you are self-publishing, you'll have to fill that role. editing--how can the manuscript realize its full potential? Are there problems to fix? Polishing needed? At a publisher, the "development editor" is assigned manuscripts as they are acquired and is responsible for getting them into shape (at children's publishers, the acquisition and development editor are usually the same person). If you are self-publishing, how will you edit your manuscript? Editing yourself isn't effective. You'll have to hire someone. designing--what's so complicated about designing a book? Anyone can do it with a word processor, right? Well, not if you want a book that's optimally designed for ease of reading, with a type face that suits your subject, and that doesn't just look like every other book on the market. And then there is the jacket, to make the book stand out. Publishers keep designers on staff, or hire freelancers. If you are self-publishing, you'll need a designer. art directing--are there illustrations needed? They'll need to be art directed. Publishers have art directors to work with illustrators in picture books or just on interior and jacket art. They also oversee the designers. If you are self-publishing, you'll need to take the role of art director, or hire a designer with art direction expertise. copyediting--once the manuscript is edited, is it done? No, it needs a copyeditor's eagle eye to check for correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation; to create a consistent approach to such things as compound words; to do some light fact-checking; and perhaps to mark up titles, heads, and subheads. If you are self-publishing, you'll need to hire a copyeditor. production managing--how do you settle on a printer? What do you send them? A publisher has a production manager to find printers who can do a good job within their budget; to source paper and other materials; and to oversee the actual production process. If you are self-publishing, you'll have to do this yourself, or hire a freelance production manager. distributing--how does the book get from publisher to bookstore? Publishers have warehouse operations and relationships with wholesalers and bookstore chains. Even if a book isn't in a

store, it can be readily ordered. If you are self-publishing, distribution may be your biggest challenge. You may need to work with an independent distributor, if you can find one willing to take you on. selling--how do bookstores, libraries, and schools find out about new books? Publishers send catalogs, but they also have sales people, who sit down and show the newest books, and tell booksellers or library acquisition committees which are the ones that they should be sure to have. If you are self-publishing, how will you sell your books? marketing/promoting--how does the public find out about a book? Most don't just pick it up off a shelf in a bookstore. They read a review, see an ad, or even watch an author on TV. Publishers have marketing staffs that send out review copies, create promotional items, and book authors on tours. If you are self-publishing, you will likely need to hire a marketing specialist.

Electronic publishing