Scientific communication in the digital age

2.1 Introduction

The advances in digital technologies, the rapid growth in the numbers of submissions of papers to scientific journals, problems with peer review, emergence of social media as a vehicle of communication in science, and alternative metrics for evaluating the impact of research are causing a dramatic change in scientific publishing (Harley, 2013; Könneker and Lugger, 2013; Rabesandratana, 2013).

The development of new information architecture and Semantic Web technologies that are based on open access, open data, and open standards allow users to exchange content online and collaborate with people of similar interests. The web makes it possible to publish, share, and link text, data, images, video, and other artifacts that can be aggregated and stored in a cloud. In this new inter-connected digital environment, known as Scholarship 2.0, scientists will be able to use tools provided by the new Internet technologies to collaborate and build new knowledge on the existing science.

The next sections of this chapter discuss how the new technologies and ideas are challenging the traditional forms of scientific publishing, changing the whole STEM publishing field.

2.2 Challenging the traditional scientific publishing model

It is obvious to many that the current publication system has become in many respects dysfunctional, which Priem and Hemminger attributed to “the tight coupling of the journal system: the system’s essential functions of archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification are bundled together and soloed into … individual journals. This tight coupling makes it difficult to change any one aspect of the system, choking out innovation” (Priem and Hemminger, 2012). They proposed adopting a “decoupled journal (DcJ)” system, in which the functions are “unbundled” and scholars can use many different services to deposit their articles and have them indexed and reviewed by different agencies, taking advantage of new web technologies, tools, and networks.

The peer review as practiced by traditional journals has been widely criticized, with alternative models emerging to challenge it (Bornmann and Daniel, 2009). Open-access pioneer Vitek Tracz believes that anonymous peer review is “sick and collapsing under its own weight” (Rabesandratana, 2013). He has launched an open-access journal, F1000Research, in which articles and all supporting data can be reviewed by eligible peers as soon as they are posted online.

In an editorial (Are we refereeing ourselves to death? The Peer‐Review System at its limit), François Diederich, chairman of the editorial board of one of the most respected chemistry journals, Angewandte Chemie, described the situation with peer review in this way:

He pointed out to the unsustainability of peer review at a time when research is taking place on an “unprecedented scale” and “the rapid rise of China in the last two decades has contributed to an enormous growth in the number of publications” (Diederich, 2014). This is how Maureen Rouhi, former editor of the ACS journal Chemical & Engineering News (Rouhi, 2014), described the contributions of countries in Asia to the global research and publishing enterprise:

Reviewing papers for publication has become a significant burden for many scientists, who have many other responsibilities—supervising graduate students, attending seminars and meetings, working on committees, reviewing grants, etc. Several thousand scientists who were surveyed by the National Science Board listed the following top bureaucratic burdens as predominant: proposals, progress reports, agency-specific requirements, effort reporting, data sharing, finances, conflict of interest reporting, human and animal subject protections, and biosafety (Widener, 2014). It might not look so improbable, then, for an article sent for review to a respected but busy researcher to wind up on the desk of a postdoc or even a graduate student.

Another problem with peer review is that it is often difficult to find scientists who are experts in a very specific and narrow field. Then, the reviewers that are selected (and these could be very well respected scientists) may not be working in the particular area of the research reported in the paper. Such reviewers have to rely on their general knowledge of the field rather than on any direct experience, thus making the evaluation less accurate and of a general type.

The publishing field in which scientific knowledge is filtered by peer review and other journal selection processes has moved toward a more open environment (Delgado López-Cózar et al., 2013), and it is important that the publishing system and the academic institutions create incentives for reviewers and reward them for their work, because reviewing reflects well on the department and the organization as a whole.

2.3 The impact of the Open Access Movement on STEM publishing

The Budapest Open Access Initiative of February 14, 2002 (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2014), defined open access (OA) as “… free availability on the public Internet, permitting users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose …”

The OA movement has triggered much broader changes in society, in general, and in science, in particular, than expected (Lagoze et al., 2012; Suber, 2012, 2014). Its benefits are now generally accepted, as more people have access to research findings and researchers get more citations of their articles. Increased public interest in science information is quickly and dramatically changing the scientific discourse. Content previously available only to specialists can now be accessed by a wider audience. Patients now often go to their doctors carrying copies of articles they have downloaded from scientific journals.

The culture in a discipline and how researchers in a particular field perform their research play a significant role in choosing outlets for disseminating their work. Faculty still depend for promotion on publishing in high-impact journals that attract the majority of the better papers (Harley, 2013). In some disciplines, researchers have cultivated strong relationships with their professional organizations and are more likely to submit papers to their journals. This is particularly true for chemists, for whom having an article accepted for publication by a reputable ACS journal would be like winning a gold medal.

This is how Bryan Vickery, former editorial director of the OA publisher Chemistry Central, viewed the differences between the disciplines (Baykoucheva, 2007):