Visions of the future for academic publishing - BioMed Central blog

"This month sees the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions – the world's first science journal – which is still published today. Much of our contemporary approach to publishing research began with the launch of that journal, but what does the future hold?  Philosophical Transactions’ first editor, Henry Oldenburg, famously conceived the principle functions of publication in a research journal in 1665 as registration, validation, dissemination and archiving. He also carried out an early form of peer review where he asked colleagues for opinions on manuscripts outside his area of expertise – though peer review as we know it wasn’t widely accepted until the 20th century.

Journal publishing has evolved – a little – since 1665. We all recognise the typical format of the scientific article and support the concept of the final published article as an immutable version of record, fixed at a point in time. The published article has become an important element in the assessment of an individual’s or an institution’s research; in fact, one of the most widely used measures of success in research is citations to the publications resulting from that research.  To what extent has this evolution led to a gold standard system, and is this as good as it gets? Or are we constrained by standards developed while we printed articles on paper, bound them and posted them in the mail?  The first journals were launched in order to disseminate research more widely than was possible through personal networks, but now it seems that the traditional format of the article and journal is restricting dissemination.  Could the growing support for themes such as openness, accessibility, collaboration and effectiveness, driven by technology and social communications, radically change the format and role of the research article and journal publishing?  At the recent BioMed Central roadshows in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, four of my colleagues took a look at journal publishing and cast their eyes to the future. We hope our thoughts – captured below – provoke the same discussion and debate that our audiences took part in ..."