Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in journal article or book form. Much, though not all, academic publishing relies on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication.

Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, though many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary, and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. The kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions of knowledge or research vary greatly between fields, as do review and publication processes.

Academic publishing is undergoing major changes, emerging from the transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources, particularly journals, has been very common. Currently, a major trend, particularly with respect to scholarly journals, is open access. There are two main forms of open access: open access publishing, in which the articles or the whole journal is freely available from the time of publication; and self-archiving, where the author makes a copy of their own work freely available on the web.

STM publishing is a frequently-used abbreviation for academic publications in science, technology, and medicine.