Academic Publishing Through History
Note: Text in orange highlight refers to the related image.
17th and 18th centuries: Establishment
- First journal: Journal des Sçavans, France, January 5, 1665 (image source: Wikimedia; public domain)
- Prototype for journals to come in 17th and 18th centuries (Regazzi, 2015, p. 24)
- Journal des Savants: successor of Journal des Sçavans (1797-present)
- Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge (1660)
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, March 6, 1665
- Established priority and ownership of scientific discoveries and a way to archive them (Regazzi, 2015, p. 25)
- Developed peer-review process
- Now published as two journals: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (1886-present)
18th through early 20th centuries: Institutionalization
- Growth of more specialized journals
- Chemisches Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen, 1778-1781, chemistry (German but published in Latin (Regazzi, 2015, pp. 26-27)), followed by many more
- Better printing methods (image: Koenig's 1814 steam-powered printing press. Source: Wikimedia; public domain)
- Abstracts and author/subject indexing for better classification
- University presses are established; start publishing more than scholarly societies
- Johns Hopkins University, 1878
- American Journal of Mathematics, 1878
- University of Chicago, 1891
- University of California, 1893
- Columbia University, 1893
- Research takes time, publishing happens eventually
World War II and Postwar: Commercialization
- Growth of scholarly publishing and funding
- Scholarly societies can’t keep up
- WWII and postwar: Great increase in government-funded research in US and UK
- National Science Foundation founded in 1950 = academic research boom
- Academic journals: primary means of publishing scholarly communication
- Business partnerships between scholarly and university presses and commercial publishers
- Butterworth’s + Springer = Pergamon Press (now owned by Elsevier)
- New discipline? New journal!
- 1959: 40 journals; 1965: 150 (Buranyi, 2017)
- Business boomed in the 1960s and 1970s, journal prices rose, university libraries foot the bill
- Tracking impact, bibliometrics
Late 20th through early 21st centuries: Digitization
- 1970s: Electronic publishing and archiving
- First electronic journal published 1979 (one-time experiment)
- 1990s: Electronic peer-reviewed academic journals founded in universities
- Captive audience, flatlining budgets, “Big Deals” (prepackaged sets of journals that supposedly saved the libraries money in subscription fees)
- Open Access: “permanent, free online access to the full text of all refereed research journal articles” (quoted in Regazzi, 2015, p. 31; lock icon: public domain)
- 1999: Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards
- 2001: First e-print archive
- 2001: Budapest Open Access Initiati
- 2003: Berlin Declaration on Open Access
- 2008: National Institutes of Health Public Access Mandate
- 2013: Office of Science and Technology Memo: "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research"
- 2022: Office of Science and Technology Memo "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research"
References