Exploring new vistas in biomedical journal publishing (original) (raw)

A History of Scientific Journals: publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015

2022

Modern scientific research has changed so much since Isaac Newton’s day: it is more professional, collaborative and international, with more complicated equipment and a more diverse community of researchers. Yet the use of scientific journals to report, share and store results is a thread that runs through the history of science from Newton’s day to ours. Scientific journals are now central to academic research and careers. Their editorial and peer-review processes act as a check on new claims and findings, and researchers build their careers on the list of journal articles they have published. The journal that reported Newton’s optical experiments still exists. First published in 1665, and now fully digital, the Philosophical Transactions has carried papers by Charles Darwin, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking. It is now one of eleven journals published by the Royal Society of London. Unrivalled insights from the Royal Society’s comprehensive archives have enabled the authors to investigate more than 350 years of scientific journal publishing. The editorial management, business practices and financial difficulties of the Philosophical Transactions and its sibling Proceedings reveal the meaning and purpose of journals in a changing scientific community. At a time when we are surrounded by calls to reform the academic publishing system, it has never been more urgent that we understand its history.

Towards a history of scientific publishing

History of Science, 2022

Towards a history of scientific publishing (accepted version) (Introduction to the special issue "Cultures of scientific publishing", History of Science 60/2 (2022)) Although individual aspects of a history of scientific publishing have been intensively researched, other dimensions of the field continue to be less visible. With a few exceptions-Ludwik Fleck and his concept of the Denkkollektiv (thought collective) and Bruno Latour's science in action-, 1 integrative approaches to a constructivist and practice-orientated history of science including Knorr-Cetina's epistemic cultures, Pickstone's ways of knowing and Ankeny's and Leonelli's repertoires have also touched on publishing only marginally, if at all. 2 There are a number of reasons for this. On the one hand, the lasting concentration of historians of science on object-related practices has diminished their interest in scientific textuality and print. 3 On the other, for many if not most historians of science, publication practices and their protagonists lie outside the realm of what they consider to be 'science'as if the making and the communication of science can be categorically separated from each other. This special issue aims to correlate the practice of making science with the practice of making it public, address the thematic, chronological and geographical breadth of scientific publishing, and thus hopes to contribute to a more integrative history of this topic. Scientific journals have so far been at the centre of attention. Interest has focused on their predecessors from the second half of the seventeenth century, in particular, the Philosophical transactions, the Journal des sçavans and the Acta eruditorum; on their thematic diversification from the second half of the eighteenth century; and, finally, on the rise of the journal to become the main medium for publishing the results of scientific research. Much work has been done recently in Anglophone history of science on how this process unfolded in Britain, so this does not need to be repeated here. 4 Instead, two

Death of scientific journals after 350 years

FEMS microbiology letters, 2018

Scientific journals have virtually disappeared as subscription-based familiar paper copies. These have been replaced by article by article access on internet sites (either subscription based paid for by libraries in multi-journal often million dollar 'Big Deal' packages or by author prepayments of thousand dollars 'article processing fees' (Omary and Lawrence, Dealing with rising publication costs. The Scientist 2017;31:29-31), followed by open access. The result appears to be the death of the traditional scientific journal as a familiar means of communication, after nearly 350 years from the time of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke (for two early microbiology examples). Rather than journals with page numbers, individual reports are accessed using titles or manuscript file code numbers. This commentary is knowingly provocative, describing the rapidly changing situation in scientific publication at the beginning of the 21st century and predicting a bad future, b...

Journals and the history of science

Firenze MCMXCVIII XXXII JOURNALS AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE Finito di stampare nel mese di novembre 1998 dalla TIBERGRAPH s.r.l. -Citta Á di Castello (PG) Finito di stampare nel mese di dicembre 1998 dalla TIBERGRAPH s.r.l. -Citta Á di Castello (PG) ISBN 88 222 4678 0 ISBN 88 222 4678 0