FEATURE ARTICLE
Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
Can scientists find ways to share published research without high cost? The experiences of one society suggest it can be done cheaply, even profitably
Thomas Walker
The Evolution of Scientific Publishing
In 1665, the Royal Society of London published the first issue of the first scientific journal. The journal's purpose was to disseminate the results of members' research, allowing scientists to reach a wider audience than they would by exchanging private letters. Journals soon became a means of establishing priority for new discoveries, were accepted as the permanent record of research and were archived by libraries. Peer review of all or most articles was instituted as a means of screening and improving what was published. Citations to earlier articles provided a way to weave previous research into the fabric of the new.
For nearly 300 years, the numbers of journals grew steadily, mostly as investigators founded new societies to promote new or newly important scientific disciplines. These societies helped members publish their research results by sponsoring one or more journals. Until the 1960s, most societies recovered publication costs largely from members' dues, which included a journal subscription. The number of articles published by each author was relatively small, and many members did not publish at all. Library subscriptions were not a major source of income for publishers. Although scientific societies published most science journals, some were published by other nonprofit institutions such as universities, museums and governments. Commercial publishers were generally not attracted to the field because there was little potential for profit.
The postwar science boom in the U.S. vastly increased the education and employment of scientists. The number of U.S. science and engineering Ph.D.'s awarded each year tripled between 1958 and 1968 and continued to increase until the early '70s. With many more scientists and with support of research easily available and generous, submissions to journals surged. The surge did not abate when grants and academic jobs eventually became more difficult to acquire. After all, an important indicator of research success is the number of papers published, and investigators seeking jobs, grants, tenure and promotion wanted to improve their chances in an increasingly competitive environment.
Societies soon faced the problem of having to reject good manuscripts and to delay publication of accepted manuscripts because their journals and their ability to subsidize members' publication were at capacity. Granting agencies faced the dilemma of paying for research that could not be published in a timely fashion or at all. In 1961, to alleviate the financial strains on journal publishing, the federal government approved the payment of page charges (fees for publication) by federal agencies and from federal grants to nonprofit publishers. Societies quickly took advantage of this new source of revenue to publish more pages in their established journals and to start new journals. For example, in my field, the Entomological Society of America approximately doubled the size of its Journal of Economic Entomology in the four years after it began page charges, and it started a new journal, Environmental Entomology, which by its second year exceeded the pre-page-charge size of JEE. Nonetheless, societies did not come close to satisfying the burgeoning need for publishing outlets.
Commercial publishers seized the opportunity to offer scientific investigators new outlets for their manuscripts. They started new journals in long-established fields; but, of greater impact, they identified new or newly popular research areas (Microbial Ecology, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Insect Biochemistry, to name a few familiar to me) and established journals in those specialties. In each case, the publisher would invite carefully chosen eminent scientists in the specialty to be members of an editorial board for the journal. Most such scientists were willing to be so recognized and to help establish a journal that would increase the status and publishing opportunities for their field. With the endorsement of an international board of distinguished scientists, the publisher attracted the subscriptions and the manuscripts needed to start the journal on its way to becoming indispensable to investigators and to the libraries that served those investigators. Adding to the attraction of these journals to authors was their lack of page charges.
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