CNS Newsletter: From Clay Tablets to eReaders: How Digitalization Changed Scientific Publishing

"Digitalization also changed the medium of publication from printed journal 'papers', over to PDF files to alternative formats like ReadCube. Also, not only do publication databases enable fast searches for relevant literature, but newly established scientific social networks (like ResearchGate, Academia.edu or Mendeley by Elsevier) allow easy access to individual researchers and their work. Nowadays, this often includes "non-traditional" formats such as blogs or podcasts [7,3].

New technologies and digital tools have also influenced the kind of published data itself: Original studies can now easily include raw experimental data as supplemental files or freely available databases for other researchers to inspect. Web-based journals also allow easy embedding of various multimedia files as realized in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, a methodology-oriented online journal which publishes video files with accompanying manuscripts. Digital tools have generally sped up the generation of data and graphics, but made the publishing process prone to manipulation of images and data, thus contributing to the 'irreproducibility crisis' [8]. In summary, digitalization made our primary goal of creation and distribution of knowledge faster, more flexible and versatile."