The basic function of academic publishing is to disseminate the output of research and scholarship so that new ideas and discoveries can be shared quickly with the
academic community and others can then build on this research. Traditionally, this has been in the form of scholarly journals, books and theses. Generally, scholarly outputs will have gone through some form of peer/editorial review which acts as a quality control mechanism. Published output serves to establish a scholar’s reputation as other scholars cite their publications. This has led to citation count being used as a tool to evaluate the quality of an individual’s research and the use of bibliometrics to assess both individuals and institutions in terms of excellence or otherwise. This is widely acknowledged to be a flawed system. Increasingly with the use of technology other forms of publishing are gaining traction such as open access publishing or the use of social media in an attempt to produce a fuller picture of the impact of research. Scholars now speak of having to have a publishing strategy as traditional publishing outputs struggle to cope with the increased output of scholars.