Scholarly communication is caught between the traditions of the past and the possibilities of the future. Specifically, scholarly open-access publishing is enabling greater access to research but, at the same time, is enabling an abundance of low quality publishers and an apparent increase in author misconduct. In this article I examine six questions that frame the current state of scholarly communication. The questions examine the gold open-access model, the differences in research cultures that make open access more popular in some regions than others, the demarcation between science and non-science, the Eurodominance of scholarly publishing, and the advantages to research that large science publishers make possible.