Sharing science
By Carrie Lock

In 1665, Henry Oldenburg, a German publisher and prolific letter writer, changed the future of science. His Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London spawned the dominant form of scientific communication for the next three and half centuries. Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton waged intellectual battles over springs, optics, and gravity in its pages. By the late nineteenth century, other journals, including Nature and Physical Review, appeared, and as scientific progress marched along, their pages filled with articles by Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and other scientific luminaries.

Journals hold a special place in the lives of scientists. The number of articles they publish and in what journals significantly affects the course of their careers – where they work, how much funding they get, and how much respect they can expect from their peers. For some, articles are not just a means of communication, but end products. Today, however, business pressures and emerging technologies seem likely to change everything about scientific communication – who finances it, who has access to it, even what constitutes a scientific journal.

These journals have operated under the same basic rules since their inception. Authors submit research for publication to the most prestigious journal. Their colleagues, commonly three, read and review the article anonymously, and recommend to the editor to either accept or reject the article for publication, as well as noting its strengths and weaknesses, and suggesting revisions. This peer-review does not certify that these decisions are good ones – the reviewers do not replicate the experiments or analyze the data. It only means that the methodology is sound, the conclusions follow the data, and the research has some degree of relevance. Once an article passes peer review, the journal publishes it months or even years later, and other scientists in that particular field eventually read it. In recent times, some journal editors have taken steps to accelerate publication, such as posting articles online before they appear in print.

Financial problems, however, have recently plagued the scientific publishing industry. Non-profit and academic organizations used to dominate the business, but for-profit publishers entered the...