Electronic Dissertations Library

Exploring the development of the independent, electronic, scholarly journal, by Alison Wells

Brief history of scholarly journals.

Until the late seventeenth century, communication between scholars depended heavily on personal contact and attending meetings arranged by the early learned societies (e.g. the Royal Society). As the membership of these societies increased, more people could not attend the meetings and so the Proceedings, usually circulated as a record of the last meeting became a place to publish papers that had not been presented at the meetings at all and moved towards what we now recognise as scholarly journals.

The first peer reviewed journals were Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Journal de Scavans both first published in 1665 (Ellis, 1997; Monty, 1996) These and following journals were mainly published by societies and non-profit making organisations (Walker, 1998) and were set up to legitimise scientific claims and summarise the "already unmanageable glut of technical books" (Mahoney in Rathey, 1994). The Philosophical Transactions published research on a broad range of topics. In the 19th century there was an explosion in the number of journals produced caused by the increased specialisation and diversification of academic research and also inexpensive mass publication on cheap wood pulp based paper. (Valauskas, 1997) This massive increase in output meant that the societies found it more and more difficult to keep up. Although there had been some commercial publishers around before (Elsevier Scientific Publishing was publishing engineering journals as far back as 1884 (Smith & Lorimer, 1999)), Robert Maxwell pioneered the move toward mass commercial publication after World War II when he set up the Pergamon Press (Rambler, 1999) and this meant that by the 1960's commercial publishers were a major part of the market (Walker, 1998).

Although the first prototype e-journal was in 1976 (Monty, 1996), the pioneering time for electronic journals was 1990-95, (Hitchcock et al., 1997) mainly dominated by non-profit making groups interested in exploiting the technology for its own sake. The commercial publishers joined in around 1996 and are now dominant, mainly with direct electronic copies of their print journals.

Wilkinson (1998) notes that in the 15th century Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press was a great leap forward, and that now, the invention of the Web is an equally great leap. Willis (1995) agrees, calling the arrival of electronic communication "the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge" after spoken language, written language and the printing press. However Odlyzko (September 1997) points out that there was an "extensive resistance to print by scholars" in Gutenberg's time which included calls to ban the new technology because only trash was getting into print and books were not as durable as parchment. The reaction to the Web of today's scholars has largely echoed the reaction of scholars to the printing press in the 15th century.

References:

Ellis, D.(1997). Peer review : the refereeing process [http://www.shef.ac.uk/training/gsc600/wk_10note.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Hitchcock, S., Carr, L. & Hall, W. (November 1997). Web journals publishing : a UK perspective. [http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/uksg.htm]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Monty, V. (January 1996). Electronic journals : new publishing paradigm. [http://www.library.yorku.ca/staff2/vmonty/ejournal.htm]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Odlyzko, A. (September 1997). The slow evolution of electronic publishing. [http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/slow.evolution.txt]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Rambler, M. (March 1999). "A new solution to the journals crisis", Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4(3). [http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-03/rambler.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Rathey, S. (1994). Electronic journals and peer review : perils and promises. [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/rathie/elecpub/paper3.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Smith, R. & Lorimer, R. (March 1999).Scholarly communication: electronic journal publishing in the 21 Century. [http://www.sfu.ca/~smith/courses/cmns438/438lecture.html]. Site visited at 22.6.99

Valauskas, E.J. (September 1997). "First Monday and the evolution of electronic journals", Journal of Electronic Publishing, 3(1). [http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/FirstMonday.html] . Site visited at 16.4.99

Walker, T.J. (1998)."Free Internet access to traditional journals", American Scientist, 86(5). [http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Wilkinson, S.L. (May 1998). "Electronic publishing takes journals into a new realm", Chemical and Engineering News, 18.5.98. [http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980518/elec.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

Willis, J. (1995). Bridging the gap between traditional and electronic scholarly publishing. [http://www.coe.uh.edu/~brobin/Educom95/EducomJW/index.html]. Site visited at 16.4.99

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