Death of scientific journals after 350 years

Abstract

Scientific journals have virtually disappeared as subscription-based familiar paper copies. These have been replaced by article by article access on internet sites (either subscription based paid for by libraries in multi-journal often million dollar 'Big Deal' packages, or by author prepayments of thousand dollars 'article processing fees' (Omary and Lawrence 2017) followed by open access). The result appears to be the death of the traditional scientific journal as a familiar means of communication, after nearly 350 years from the time of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke (for 2 early microbiology examples). Rather than journals with page numbers, individual reports are accessed using titles or manuscript file code numbers. This commentary is knowingly provocative, describing the rapidly-changing situation in scientific publication at the beginning of the 21st century and predicting a bad future, basically the end of the long-time most-used vehicles for scientific communication, the paper scientific journal with volumes and issues. This view is not particular to this author and appears frequently today (e.g. The Scientist 2012; https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/10/26/revisiting-why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/). This negative conclusion offers no better possibilities, as it is concluded that it is already too late and too far along this pathway for any meaningful middle ground. This commentary is intended for a broad group of potential readers, including authors and readers of this journal (who are active microbial scientists who need to adapt to individual manuscript identification numbers replacing volumes and page numbers), as well as the larger community interested broadly in scientific communication, and even our institutional librarians (who have experienced the disappearance of paper copies on their shelves, and especially unsustainable rapid increases in money costs at a time of very limited resources.