Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

tion in 1665, the printed journal has become the primary vehicle of knowledge dissemination
among scientists and scholars. (The field of computer science, where conferences are
preferred, is an exception.) Scientists also meet other scientists, present papers at conferences,
and write reports, monographs, textbooks, etc. But journals occupy a special place
in scholarly communication, not only because they help scientists get the status of a permanent
record for their new findings but also to establish ‘priority’, something scientists
guard jealously. Papers are given away for free and scientists do not normally get paid for
reporting their research in journals or for reviewing papers received from journal editors
before they are published, whereas publishers pay them for writing textbooks and monographs.
What are journals? They are nothing but a collection of articles written by different
authors appearing periodically. They provide a platform for researchers in a field, sometimes
very narrow (e.g. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, Annals of Maxillofacial Surgery)
and at others all embracing (Lancet covering all of medicine, and Current Science,
Nature and Science covering all of science), to announce their latest findings to other scientists
around the world. In the early days there were a few scientists and a few journals,
but in the past three centuries the number of scientists has increased exponentially. Since
the early 1700s, the number of scholars in scientific disciplines has doubled every 15
years, according to de Solla Price. 9 And the questions they ask and the experiments they
perform have become more complex and have led to the evolution of new fields, subfields
and research fronts which in turn have led to the emergence of a large number of
professional societies and specialty journals. Obviously, there will be hundreds of thousands
of articles published every year and even larger number of references to earlier articles
as it is an accepted convention to acknowledge ‘the shoulders of giants’.
Journal editors do not accept for publication all manuscripts they receive. They get
them reviewed by other scientists with expertise in the field and this process is called
peer review. Some manuscripts are recommended straightaway, some are found not good
enough for publication and many are returned to authors with comments and suggestions
for revision. “Peer review results in 1.3 million learned articles being published each year
and it is fundamental to the integration of new research findings in hundreds of fields of
inquiry and represents a unique, global collaboration in evaluation and quality assurance,”
says the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers
(STM). 10
In the past more than 340 years, the scholarly journal has not changed much. No
doubt there have been changes both in the way the content is presented and in the way
9
10
de Solla Price D J (1963), Little Science, Big Science, Columbia University Press, New York.
Peer Review Survey 2009: Preliminary Findings (2009), Sense about Science,
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/395.
Page | 6