The scientific journal is currently the subject of a global major debate within the context of the cost and accessibility of scholarly journal publishing. The structure and financial profits of journal publishing, currently dominated by five multinational publishers, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Sage and Taylor and Francis is under increased scrutiny.
Over the last four decades, the costs of journals, often bundled through annual Big Deal Journal subscription packages, have far outpaced both inflation and library budgets. The multinational publishing oligopoly has recently been challenged by initiatives, such as the cancellation of Elsevier journals by the University of California system in early 2019 and the European research funding bodies Plan S program launched in late 2018. This mandates that starting in 2020, academics receiving grants from participating agencies must make all scientific articles open access immediately upon publication.
Alex Csiszar, Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, in The Scientific Journal, provides through his introduction and conclusion a cogent overview of current issues relating to the scientific journal. In the main body of its text, he outlines the origins of the scientific journal in France and Britain in the 1660s, but his principal coverage relates to developments in the nineteenth century. Overall, he clearly demonstrates that the current form of multinational scientific publishing is not one set in historical stone, but rather one created for economic profit and research metrics purposes in the last 40 years.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, academies and societies dominated scientific publishing, not publishers. Journals were indeed a relatively marginal feature of this world. Csiszar’s extensively researched survey reveals how throughout the nineteenth century, journals gradually took over from book publishing in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, although it was the post-World War II scientific boom that accelerated the commercial publisher monopolies.
Many of the conceptual issues that confront scholarly publishing today have their origins in the nineteenth century. Thus, the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and the Mémoires of the Paris Académie des Sciences often experienced significant authorial delays in the publication of papers. It is incredible in the Internet era, that significant delays in article publishing are commonplace outside of preprint servers.
The current difficulty of accessing content behind multinational publisher pay walls was echoed in the nineteenth century. As a result, the Royal Society began publishing, in 1868, their multivolume Catalogue of Scientific Papers. Another attempt to corral scientific information was the creation in 1894 of the Institut de Bibliographie Scientifique, which provided subscribers with abstracts of recently published papers.
Csiszar’s research focuses on England and France, but that still gives enough data to provide much food for Journal contemplation. Unusual facts emerge. Many will not realise that, in 1830, British computer pioneer, Charles Babbage, suggested that quantifying authorship might be a way to identify scientific eminence. One author, however, who subsequently assessed the publications of each Fellow in the Royal Society in London, believed this was a terrible guide to scientific eminence.
A letter to Nature in 1932 lamented the growing practice of candidates submitting a ‘list of strictly technical publications’ to the Royal Society, leading to the result that ‘our journals are filled with masses of unreadable trash’ published by ambitious scholars hoping to strengthen their applications. Today, some have estimated the number of articles been produced annually is over 3 million, with the vast majority of articles apparently neither read nor cited.
Scientists, and indeed academics in general, suffer from the ‘publish or perish‘ syndrome, a term that was apparently first used in 1927 in the United States, when university librarians began complaining about the rising prices of periodicals. Dr Eugene Garfield, who created the ISI Science Citation Index in the mid-1960s never saw it as a bureaucratic tool for research evaluation metrics in determining university standings and reward structures.
Today, the scientific journal is not really about the effective dissemination of knowledge with publicly funded research results open for all to read. Rather, publication in scholarly journals is merely an instrument for individual and collective research evaluation.
Csiszar outlines the current crisis of the legitimacy of science in the public eye, as well as documenting the movement for open access. Overall, he argues that a better understanding of the journal’s past will be crucial to imagining future forms for the expression and organisation of knowledge.
As librarians move more and more into scholarly communication and publishing issues with their academic colleagues on campus, The Scientific Journal will be a very useful resource to affirm that the current framework of journal publishing is a relatively recent product. It is also a much-needed source on the history of journal publishing and the history of science.