Scientific Publishing in the 21st Century: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Environmental Social Sciences

Three decades ago, this Journal’s founders set out to make it “the authoritative social science journal in the area of natural resource research” (Burdge & Field, 1988, p. 1). One hundred pages per issue were printed and mailed to subscribers, four times per year. From the beginning, Society & Natural Resources represented and helped give voice to an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars: inaugural Editorial Board members hailed from Australia, Canada, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, the United States, and Zimbabwe. One can only begin to imagine, by today’s standards of near-instantaneous global communication, the challenges of asynchronous, ‘snail mail’ communication between authors, editors, and Editorial Board members around the globe.

How things have changed! Persistent in its mission, international and interdisciplinary in scope, this Journal now is published in twelve issues per year—of 130 pages each, a fourfold increase overall. Society & Natural Resources remains blessed with a robust, international Editorial Board, with today’s members coming from Australia, Cameroon, Canada, China, Cyprus, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States. Now, articles are published online in as little as a month following acceptance; manuscripts are submitted, reviewed, edited, formatted, and proofread online. Hundreds of new submissions are received each year; expert peer reviewers from every corner of the globe are engaged in frank assessment, evaluation, and constructive suggestions for improving reviewed manuscripts. Commencing in 2016, this Journal began publishing Supplemental Online Materials, adding value and further strengthening its virtual presence.

More changes lie ahead in the world of scientific publishing, which continues to evolve in exciting yet disruptive leaps and bounds. Key developments include the burgeoning of online publishing; growing clamor for open, online, any-time access to journal articles; increased institutional emphasis on publishing in ISI-rated journals such as this one; and escalating demands on a mostly volunteer scholarly publishing editorial and peer review workforce. ‘Predatory’ online journals take advantage of the incessant ‘publish or perish’ pressure on researchers in academia and government agencies. With the explosion of scientific journals (scores in the environmental sciences alone) and submissions (thousands and thousands of manuscripts per year), expert peer reviewers’ time, energy and patience face unprecedented pressure that calls for critical reflection on how their contributions to scholarly publishing are rewarded. At the same time, instances of scholarly fraud and manipulation receive increasing attention, including via websites/blogs such as RetractionWatch.com, while organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, publicationethics.org) bring publishers, editors, and authors of peer reviewed journals together to discuss and address current issues of publication ethics. New scientific journal models that experiment with innovative ways of organizing and financing editorial review and publishing are emerging, for instance at www.peerj.com.

These are times of both challenge and opportunity for scientific journal publishing. What does it mean today to be an international journal of social science research on natural resources? Increasingly online in our publishing orientation, this Journal enters its thirtieth year as both a print and online publication. Will this still be the case ten years from now? With online access accelerating around the globe, Society & Natural Resources’ international readership and submission numbers are growing, too. How are this Journal’s publishers, editors, and supporting organizations responding? SNR’s editors and its publisher, Taylor & Francis, work with forward-looking institutions to build in and/or negotiate Open Access for articles published by their social scientists; in the developed world, funding agencies are primed to pay for publication charges for similar purposes. An increasing number of this Journal’s articles are published in Open Access format; our publisher and editors curate an annual, Free Access collection of featured articles from around the world. Such measures help, but are just a start. With rapid changes in publishing, concerns about equity in access for authors, readers, reviewers, and editors in the global South are growing. As publishing entities and communities of scholars, how can we provide not only access but also support, assistance, and tangible rewards for all who enrich us so much through their intellectual labor? Sustained publication of a high-quality, expert peer reviewed, scientific journal has social as well as individual benefits, but is not without costs and necessary investments in securing, developing, and nurturing human capital.

Society & Natural Resources remains committed to being “the repository of knowledge about natural resource development and use from the perspective of social science theory and method” and “to chart new research directions for solving interdisciplinary problems related to resource management and development” (Burdge & Field, 1988, p. 1). Now entering its fourth decade, this Journal must also, in our view, build on its historical commitments and become an even stronger vehicle for helping develop the capacity of academics and practitioners around the world to communicate the very best interdisciplinary social science scholarship and practice-based knowledge, to deepen understanding and provide the analytical tools necessary to effectively and equitably address critical challenges of our times in the conservation, management, and use of natural resources. Society & Natural Resources was born of a dedicated, international, interdisciplinary community of scholars; it continues to represent and serve that community, even as the world of scientific journal publishing transforms rapidly around us.