ABSTRACT

Scholarly communication is not just about communication. It is not the final stage of the publication process, solely a means of providing the ‘minutes of science’. Rather, it is a vital part of the research process itself, inspiring researchers along new avenues of discovery and enabling the creation of connections between concepts and people. The ways in which researchers disseminate their research have changed and developed over the four centuries since the launch of the first scientific journals. But it can be argued that scholarly communication has in turn affected the way in which researchers behave. This chapter explores some of the interaction and interdependencies between researchers and scholarly communication. It also describes how the move to online, electronic publishing might further influence the research process.

Introduction

We tend to think of the history of scholarly journal publishing as an unbroken thread of consistent activity since the founding of the first journals. In reality, journals have changed in many ways over the past 350 odd years, and so has the research environment. It may be obvious that publishing activity will alter in order to reflect changes in the research process, but it may also be argued that the research process itself has changed, at least in part, as a result of developments in scholarly communication. This chapter will investigate the two-way flow of influence between research and publishing, in terms both of a 400-year history and of looking forward to new developments.

The rise of journals

The birth of the modern system of scholarly communications is generally taken to be the launching of the first two scientific journals, the Journal des Sçavans in 1665 and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1666. These journals reflected the growing interest in natural philosophy at the time, but also, through their very existence, began to initiate changes in scholarly practice. Before the mid-seventeenth century it was not the norm for ‘scientists’ (to use an anachronism: they would not have recognized the term) to share their findings. While they were as concerned with issues of priority as are modern researchers – witness the famously bitter battle between Newton and Liebnitz regarding the invention of calculus – they were hoarders of knowledge, reluctant to give what we would describe as a competitive advantage to their rivals.