Dave's Blog

This is a fight I have been looking to start for some time. It comes from discussion about where we should be looking to publish our research outputs and reading about the restoration period in Europe (triggered in turn by reading Neil Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy).

The central question is this: “Why are we still talking about Journal, particularly electronic journals in the age of the Internet?” The academy seems to have a fixation on this example of 18^th Century technology, and seems loath to face up to the fact that this specific from of publishing is now redundant. Now what do I mean by journal, and I am talking here about scholarly journals:

1. The are bound – they contain a set number of articles

2. the are periodic – they are produced at set intervals

3. the articles conform to set, and strict, guidelines as to their length

We can quite clearly see the format of the print world being mimicked in the electronic world. Now when producing a physical artifact that needs to be distributed over distances, publishers need to be aware of size and weight restrictions, the cost of production is influenced by the length. These are restrictions that have existed since the birth of the scholarly journal, in the late 17^th century. The scholarly societies needed a way to communicate with members not at their meetings, and like minded individuals across Europe. Printing technology had reached a point where this could be done and by the start of the 18^th Century journals where produced in London (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society), Paris and Berlin.

With the advent of the Internet the economics have changed radically, information is no longer a scarce commodity. The you publish a specific article doesn't mean that you won't be publishing another. The fossilized journal article also a poor form for a hypertext environment – why not link to your data, your sources, include video? With the opportunities offered by the Internet we have the potential to make scholarly information available on a scale never imagined a mere 20 years ago, instead we seem to be cleaving to forms that are guaranteed to ensure the ongoing scarcity of information while simultaneously ensuring that much important information is not made available till after its obsolete.