Scholarly communication in science, technology, and medicine has been organized around journal-based scientific publishing for the past 350 years. Scientific publishing has unique business models and includes stakeholders with conflicting interests—publishers, funders, libraries, and scholars who create, curate, and consume the literature. Massive growth and change in scholarly communication, coinciding with digitalization, have amplified stresses inherent in traditional scientific publishing, as evidenced by overwhelmed editors and reviewers, increased retraction rates, emergence of pseudo-journals, strained library budgets, and debates about the metrics of academic recognition for scholarly achievements. Simultaneously, several open access models are gaining traction and online technologies offer opportunities to augment traditional tasks of scientific publishing, develop integrated discovery services, and establish global and equitable scholarly communication through crowdsourcing, software development, big data management, and machine learning. These rapidly evolving developments raise financial, legal, and ethical dilemmas that require solutions, while successful strategies are difficult to predict. Key challenges and trends are reviewed from the authors’ perspective about how to engage the scholarly community in this multifaceted process.
Scientific publishing dates from 1665 when Henry Oldenburg founded Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first journal serving its subscribers with a digest of scholarly reports,1 followed in 1684 by Medicina Curiosa, the first periodical entirely devoted to medicine.2 Today, journals represent a fundamental form of scholarly communication, with over 42,000 peer-reviewed periodicals published worldwide.3 The digital revolution has created unprecedented opportunities for scientific publishing. Global search engines may find almost any of the more than 150 million scientific documents ever published.3 Nearly instantaneous communication has substantially improved our ability to globally share, debate, endorse, and reuse research methods and findings.4 An increasing fraction of peer-reviewed scholarly output is published as “Open Access” (OA), allowing the user to read the articles at no charge and reuse their content in varying degrees. Similarly, vast online databases for genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics research have become publicly available (“Open Data”). Additionally, various types of social media are used to promote scholarly work and engage a spectrum of professionals in conversations across the world. At the same time, sharply increasing subscription charges have put university libraries under financial pressure and have discouraged individual clinicians and scientists from subscribing.5 Exponential growth in academic publishing has overwhelmed journal editors and peer reviewers, many of whom donate substantial amounts of unpaid effort to evaluate the scientific value of submitted manuscripts. With online publishing, predatory journals and plagiarism have become an increasing concern.6, 7 Furthermore, “pirate” operations illegally posting millions of academic papers have emerged to meet the perceived needs of readers with limited online access.8
Key stakeholder groups have fixed priorities as they adapt to the changing world of scholarly communication. Authors pursue academic rewards and readership want free access, while many publishers pursue higher profit margins and libraries strive for their role as custodians of scientific literature. Some of these are conflicting goals that will require new strategies to succeed. Here we review this process from the perspective of authors of scientific literature to explore answers to the following questions: 1) Who will pay for tomorrow’s scientific publishing? 2) How will current publishing trends impact the academic promotion process? 3) Will fairness and equity in scientific publishing be ensured and sustained? and 4) How will key stakeholders and their priorities change scholarly communication?4
To read this article in its entirety please visit our website.
-Gyorgy Baffy, MD, PhDa,b,cMichele M. Burns, MDc,d, Beatrice Hoffmann, MD, PhDc,e, Subha Ramani, MBBS, PhDb,c, Sunil Sabharwal, MBBSc,f, Jonathan F. Borus, MDc,g, Susan Pories, MDc,h, Stuart F. Quan, MDb,c, Julie R. Ingelfinger, MDc,i
