My first article publication in an international scientific journal, one of those indexed, with peer review, was in 1987. Everything on paper. The article, already written with some text editor, which no longer exists, on some computer, now unimaginably obsolete, was printed in three copies, sent along with a letter, also printed, by mail. Weeks later a letter arrived, confirming receipt at the publisher. The editor then sent two copies to the reviewers, who responded by letters. The set, opinions and letter from the editor, then arrived in my hands by post. With the requested corrections made to the article, the entire process began again. Finally, news of the accepted article, that third printed copy, which had remained with the editor, returned with colored pencil markings, indicating what would be capital letters, what would be in bold, how the equations would be edited, according to the guide attached edition, similar to the illustration published here. New letter to the editor, agreeing with the editing instructions. A little more and the proofs of the article arrived for my consideration. After all, someone at the publisher transcribed and edited my printed text, along with the editing instructions made by the editor or an assistant, and the figures inserted in the middle of the text. The figures made up a separate chapter: the originals, initially sent along with the printed copies, were in Indian ink on tracing paper (we had designers to professionalize our drafts). Article accepted, the figures went to the publisher's photographic laboratory. Everything manual and analogue, the work of several people. And there was the form about payment for this process.
We in the third world at the time were forgiven for defaulting by sending a respectful letter apologizing and being exempted due to lack of resources. The periodicals were supported by subscriptions from libraries, with closed access, but they also relied on payments from authors for publication, the page charges. Those of us who didn't pay suspected that we might experience some additional delay in publication, but these rumors, according to my personal experience, were never confirmed. We don't forget the first article, but I no longer remember the one that was my first in which this entire manual, analogue and printed process was being replaced by electronic and digital steps without paper and physical mail. Most researchers working today did not go through this transition at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, and perhaps they do not realize that, even without paper, new transitions continue to occur, which are being incorporated without much surprise and with immediate acceptance – after all, we all want to see our articles published. So it is worth remembering the promises, dilemmas and conflicts about how we went from paper to the digital cloud in science.
First of all, it is also necessary to present a summary of where we are in this process today. All magazines have their electronic portals, where the published articles, organized into volumes and numbers as in the past, can be accessed with one click, either to read on the screen or to download the file, as Portable Document Format, commonly known as PDF, for later reading. The portals also have article submission tabs, with instructions for authors, a registration form, a page to upload the original text and any figures, a title page with information about the authors, checking references and adequacy of the Format. Reviewers also have their tab, containing the registration page, the password record, the article to be evaluated, already available in PDF and the evaluation form, in which questions about the article are answered: yes, more or less, no. And the fields for comments to be filled in. Everything digital, no or little manual work as before, except the message from the editor to the author with the verdict, still by mail, electronically and not on paper, of course. Almost everything is automated, and much of the editing, if the article has been accepted, is already carried out by the authors themselves during the submission process. Subscriptions to periodicals by libraries, however, did not decrease in value, on the contrary. Publication fees for open access increased substantially and appeared, replacing the page charges. And very quickly they rose stratospherically, if not astronomically. It's the open access business model.
All this from the author's point of view, the one who wants to share the knowledge produced. And on the consumer side, the one who wants access to published material? Today, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, scientific journals are online for consulting and reading articles (if you have subscription access or if the article in question is freely accessible). 30 or 40 years ago, it was something, let's say, more romantic. You would go into the library, look through the volumes of a given periodical, you could even take it away for a week and hide it in your office, but then it would be embarrassing to knock on a colleague's door, asking for access to that copy. The solution was to make a photocopy of the article of interest so that the periodicals rarely left the library. Making copies of articles violated copyright, there would be sanctions. Control, however, was difficult and no one cared. Neither the readers nor the institution. After all, the number of photocopiers was multiplying in libraries. In principle, however, it was illegal and the scientific community practiced piracy of printed material.
This is a brief summary of the transition from paper to the cloud, which actually began with the commercial internet, between 1995 and 1996, a process that promised solutions. The discussion, however, started much earlier. At the beginning of the 1980s, the debate began to boil over various points in the nostalgic picture reported so far. Some time ago, I leafed through paper periodicals in the library, a nostalgic pleasure of discoveries that smelled like paper. I randomly came across an interesting article, whose translated title is “Communication in Physics – the use of periodicals”, published in 1982 in the magazine Physics Today [I]. The headline after the title (thin line in journalistic jargon) announced: “Opinion polls and analyzes reveal interest from readers, authors, editors and libraries, indicating that the 'electronic journal' may be viable.” At a time when the internet we know today did not exist and electronic mail was slowly becoming viable[ii], it was not possible to properly imagine what the “electronic periodical” would be, as the cartoon that accompanied the article clearly suggested to readers of the following century.
The article begins by presenting the problems related to the cost of periodical subscriptions. Until the 1970s, and even at the beginning of the following decade, it was common for researchers to subscribe to the journals that interested them. This, however, became very expensive and interested parties began to give up individual subscriptions and resort to library collections, returning to the aforementioned problem of access to a copy, simultaneously, by more than one researcher. Thus the “age of separations” proliferated: the so-called preprints, reprints and… photocopies, official (paid) and pirated. For some reason, publishing costs became very high and were no longer (according to publishers) covered by subscriptions. Solution: start charging authors to pay for editing, our ghost mentioned above. It seems that, at least in the physics community, almost everyone paid, not with their own resources, but with government funding (as appears in a table in this 1982 article). This “almost everyone” refers, of course, to the community in the Northern Hemisphere.
The average cost per item of page charges it was $500 on average for American Institute of Physics journals. In current values, approximately equivalent to US$1.600. Value substantially below APCs (article processing charges) of today, which guarantee open access to articles, something that fees in the past did not provide. Nor could they, as there were only printed magazines. The electronic journal imagined at the time is not the all-online journal we have become accustomed to. It referred to the technologies that would transform the analogue edition of magazines into digital ones, in a more efficient and faster distribution of individual articles, known as reprints. Periodicals would continue to be periodicals, kept in libraries, therefore, citing this 1982 article:
Authors, publishers, libraries, and readers also place broad restrictions on the use of an electronic journal system. One problem is the lack of incentive for change for these actors. Authors, for example, are incentivized in part to publish for prestige and recognition. Any alternative communication system needs to address the perceived needs of those in “publish or perish” environments, which exist in some areas of science and organizations..
Other imagined restrictions were discussed, but I will stick to the quote above, drawing on an opinion piece from ten years later, published in Nature by its then editor, John Maddox: “Electronic journals have a future – a conference on changing journal publishing patterns suggests that electronic journals have arrived, but their management remains a problem for the future”[iii]. Today's scenario suggests that these problems have been resolved, at least for publishers, even because, as soon as the commercial internet made electronic journals as we know them possible, an entire academic tribe focused on these issues and created, Of course, a scientific journal for that, The Journal of electronic publishing[iv], indexed in Scopus. The release number index (January 1995) is worth a visit: almost all articles are about economic aspects, pricing, cost structure, licensing, management, etc. In other words, how to make the business viable.
Returning to the article by the editor of Nature in 1992. An excerpt from it caught my attention, as it elaborates part of what appears in the article from ten years earlier in Physics Today:
What drives this immense and expensive growth [number of scientific publications]? Even considering the considerable increase in the academic community, the severe criticism of duplicate articles and the serial publication of interim reports of insignificant advances (“salami slices”), the phenomenon deserves explanation.
The common thread in most explanations [of electronic publishing] is that publishing has become a kind of vanity press, existing to serve the interests of its contributors. And why such blatant interest? That unpublished research may well be considered unperformed is a generally accepted principle, but the use of published work, perhaps even weighted by the number of citations, has also become a common influence on academic appointments and promotions.
Having witnessed this transition and accepted the welcome to this brave new world, it seemed important to share these stories, among others that were left out.[v], with those who started their careers in the new world. The quotes just above remind once again that things from the new world have existed since the old, with the “vanity press” replaced by the digital one and speculations about an “alternative communication system” forgotten.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[I] The reference is in the link, which I did not have access to, as the subscription renewal is under negotiation. I took photos of the pages with my cell phone. Communication in physics—the use of journals | Physics Today | AIP Publishing
[iv] https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/
[v] It's worth taking a look at the turn-of-the-century dilemmas highlighted in an article from the year 2000: Promises and challenges of electronic journals: academic libraries surveyed
