Scientific publishing has not gone through a major change since we learned to print. Now we are in the middle of a big change which consists of online publishing, cloud computing and immediate dissemination. Since first of April the British research counsils demand that all research funded by public funds is to be made open access on publishing. Before an embargo time was accepted. Embargo ment that you hade a certain time after publishing before the article was to be made open access.
Nature has published a special number on future of publishing. Read it. There are some interesting articles such as why scientific publishing costs so much? Is, what the publishers do, worth all the billions sibscribers (libaries e.g.) pays to get access to the journals for researches to read when it is researcher who review each others work free of charge and which is a considerable part of the scientific publishing process? There also an article about researchers and librarians trying to keep up the changes and an article about the gray operators which have emerged in the wake of open access publishing. Also, check out the artickle about dissemination of scientific articles.
Pieta Eklund