Keeping up with publishing trends may help you decide not only where but also how you want to publish.

Electronic networking can change scholarly communications by:

• altering dissemination and access patterns
• transforming the presentation and transmission of scholarship

These changes can allow for greater flexibility in access and distribution, as well as opportunities to link and interlink information, whether in text or other formats. The availability of primary materials in digital form (eg cultural heritage materials and data sets) increases the options available to authors and publishers. Authors and editors could share electronic space. They would need to ask themselves questions such as:

• will narratives necessarily be presented in a linear form?
• can meaning be changed by the form in which it is read?
• are there new ways to present an authorial voice?
• how could multimedia interact with the text to create print, web, video and audio?
• can individual works of scholarship be connected through electronic networks?

The book can also be improved in the networked environment, with the possibility for innovations which could benefit scholarship and transform it into a digital monograph. For example, a book could be deconstructed into articles or chapters available online.

An e-book can contain many layers that create choice for the reader. If the reader comes upon something that especially interests them, they can click down a layer to a supplementary essay or appendix. They can continue deeper through the book, through documents, bibliographies, iconography, background music, anything the author chooses to include.

Decisions you make about what to do with your intellectual property may depend upon your research field. For example, high energy physics has no problem with making preprints (unreviewed work) freely available at the time of submission to a journal for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. Physics has always had a culture of circulating hard copy drafts to peers before submission for publication. On the other hand, publication in biology is centred around peer reviewed journals, and preprints are rare. A research area that is closely linked to commercial applications, with its researchers working in the private sector, will be unwilling to share materials in a highly competitive market place. Patents may need to be issued before results are published.