Technical advances in scientific and scholarly publication

摘要

The accepted role of scientific and scholarly publication is to record research activity in a timely fashion, keeping others in the research community up-to-date with current developments. Until very recently, it has been the case that printed journals were the most efficient method for the dissemination and archival of research results. Technical advances in the past decade have allowed the process of scholarly communication to take other forms, particularly in the dissemination and storage of articles via the World Wide Web. Developed at CERN to facilitate “instantaneous information sharing between physicists working in different universities and institutes all over the world” it gave publishers a new medium for making their journal archives available (Hitchcock et al. 1996). It also gave authors the means to break the so-called “Faustian bargain” and directly distribute their articles in pre- or post-publication form from their own Web pages (Harnad 1995) or in organised “eprint archives” (Ginsparg 1996). It was not only the technical advance provided by the printing press in the late 15th century but the emergence of a reliable postal system and the development of the experimental method in the 16th century that led to the production of the first Scientific Journal in 1665 (Schaffner 1994). In the 21st Century, it may not be simply the technical ability to reproduce and distribute articles electronically (epublishing), but also the pressure to develop collaborative, large-scale investigations and analyses (e-science) that leads to significant change in the field of scientific communication and significant changes in the way such communications are produced, curated and disseminated (Lucier 1990).