ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the background to the rhetorical studies which follow, providing an overview of trends in academic publishing and what is driving them. It considers the importance of relating these trends to changes in rhetorical and discoursal choices and of studying these diachronically. The chapter looks at the current state of journal publishing and the reasons why these changes have come about in the last 50 years. Once the preserve of gentleman scholars with private means and a desire for self-improvement, academic publication is an enormous industry that dominates the professional lives of academics across the globe. Technology has produced such profound and rapid changes in the ways that research is conducted and communicated that it is hard to evaluate the relative importance of each contribution. The emergence of open access models is a second major factor driving the expansion of academic publishing by making journal content available online and free to readers.
