Commercial publishers sometimes have a different view to those publishers associated with societies when it comes to fixing prices or to founding new journals. Last Fall, Kurt Paulus of Institute of Physics Publishing provided some insight from the point of view of the societies, this year Michael Mabe of Pergamon underlines the common goal of scientific publishers-serving the scientific community-while tracing the explosive development of the number of papers offered for publication in primary journals and the difficulties associated with dealing with them.