More on science publishing
How did it get this way?
A little while ago we pointed out that some aspects of publishing scientific results don’t seem to make much sense. In particular, a skilled and talented researcher must normally pay a journal to publish his or her paper, even though the editors agree that it would be a valuable addition to knowledge and definitely deserves to be seen. How did such a system come about?
Originally, say in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when astronomy became a truly social enterprise, astronomers wrote letters to each other. They were few enough that important results could be communicated to more or less anyone who would understand them in this informal way. Sir John Herschel was known to be the center of astronomical communication in his time, keeping in touch with all the important figures in the field. By the mid-nineteenth century it was no longer possible to do this, and the first formal journals had appeared: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Journal, Astronomische Nachrichten to name a few (these are still around). And since it was no longer true that everyone knew everyone in the field, the mechanism of peer review was invented: a submitted manuscript would be passed to a colleague who could make an informed judgement on it. In addition to these, observatories would publish their results from time to time, in annual reports or another way, as would universities.
As one might expect, a hierarchy grew up among journals. Those with the most reach became most discriminating in what they accepted; smaller, more regional publications would accept papers with less important or more specialized results. This worked, more or less. However, what we now know of as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a mainstay of stellar studies, was originally published in a journal not much read in the US, and was reinvented here. A similar fate befell Lemaître’s original work on cosmology.
After the Second World War, when astronomy became industrialized (to simplify things a lot), hiring and tenure decisions increasingly relied on one’s publication list. Although “publish or perish” may have been coined previously, it was during these decades that the imperative really began to bite. Some journals expanded: Monthly Notices was publishing three times a month by the 1990s; other journals were founded.
The pressure continues. And there has appeared the journal-for-hire: with a name similar to a known journal, or at least sounding like something respectable, it would publish almost anything (after a very nominal peer review). Our astronomer has been invited to submit to many journals of this sort, “based on your respected expertise in this field” or some similar phrasing. Often its a field he has no experience in whatsoever. There are also invitations to chair conferences or edit proceedings, again in extraneous subfields. In contrast with much of science, the economics here is visible: academics have a demand for publications to advance their careers, and will pay; hence there arises a supply.
With the move online, of course, the volume of publication has exploded. Our astronomer’s weekly trip to the library to survey paper journals is a thing of the past. We’re not sure what to replace it with.
