MSP

An eco­nom­ics view would be to mod­el each journ­al as a multi-sided mar­ket (a plat­form). Worth no­ti­cing are the read­ers’ seek­ing costs (the ef­fort and time spent find­ing an art­icle that would re­ward close read­ing), and that a sub­scrip­tion does not pur­chase art­icles as such, but an op­tion value (the avail­ab­il­ity of a stream of art­icles, on the prob­ab­il­ity of need­ing one of them in the fu­ture).

Schol­arly com­mu­nic­a­tion is built on small net­works: each au­thor is con­nect­ing with re­l­at­ively few read­ers. (Com­par­is­ons with iTunes, tele­vi­sion, or oth­er me­dia at mass-mar­ket scales may be tempt­ing, but are flawed.)

The journ­al is an es­tab­lished so­cial in­sti­tu­tion, and while it settled in its cur­rent form in the age of print, the com­munity’s habit of par­ti­cip­at­ing in the com­mons of schol­arly know­ledge, as ed­it­ors and re­view­ers, has sur­vived. For ex­ample, re­view­ers are not dir­ectly paid in part be­cause re­view­ing is un­der­stood as part of be­ing a schol­ar and help­ing the schol­arly com­munity.

Such shared un­der­stand­ings are easi­er to des­troy than launch or re­place. (The lack of suc­cess with post-pub­lic­a­tion peer-re­view mod­els — e.g., for­um-like com­ments on pub­lished ma­ter­i­als, with con­tinu­al up­dates, cor­rec­tions, eval­u­ations — is one ex­ample of a nice the­ory not mov­ing much of the prac­tice.) Ima­gined changes in col­lect­ive ac­tion are pain­less to pos­tu­late, but hard to es­tab­lish as func­tion­ing in­sti­tu­tions. If you merely build it, of­ten nobody will come.

Format­ting is a key func­tion of schol­arly com­mu­nic­a­tion, as the present­a­tion and lay­out of art­icles as­sists both fil­ter­ing and as­sim­il­a­tion. The pat­terns and con­ven­tions of the field (e.g., defin­i­tion–the­or­em–proof; in gen­er­al, the typ­ic­al struc­ture of an art­icle) of­fer guid­ance and can ac­cel­er­ate the read­er; poor writ­ing or ty­po­graphy poses obstacles. (The sens­it­iv­ity to these obstacles seems to dif­fer greatly among read­ers.)

The sur­pris­ing sur­viv­al of PDF as the format of choice (across all schol­arly pub­lish­ing) hints that the lay­out tra­di­tions from the age of print still re­main the most com­fort­able, read­able or un­der­stand­able, and again, that format­ting is im­port­ant.

Across all schol­arly fields, vari­ous growth fig­ures are re­por­ted: the num­ber of journ­als is in­creas­ing at ~3% per year; the num­ber of re­search­ers, at ~4%; the amount spent on R&D, at ~3% (on top of in­fla­tion); the num­ber of cite­able items, at ~8% (doubles every nine years). The ex­act num­bers mat­ter less than the trend and the pres­sure ad­ded: It be­comes harder to find what you need to read; it be­comes harder to eval­u­ate someone’s re­search out­put. An in­creas­ing abund­ance of con­tent leads to an in­creas­ing scarcity of re­search­ers’ time and at­ten­tion.

This makes the core func­tions of the journ­al more, not less, ne­ces­sary. The con­com­it­ant need for more fine-grained fil­ter­ing, rather than al­low that journ­als be­come su­per­flu­ous (in fa­vor of, for ex­ample, more amorph­ous pub­lic­a­tion on pre­print serv­ers or after sound­ness-only re­view), in­stead leads to fur­ther in­creases in the num­ber and gran­u­lar­ity of journ­als, at least for the near fu­ture.

To our minds, the im­port­ance of the schol­arly journ­al could di­min­ish if its roles were to be sup­planted, for ex­ample by large data-driv­en smart ser­vices, provid­ing finer clas­si­fic­a­tion and match­ing. However, such ser­vices would most likely be­come both in­dis­pens­able and ex­pens­ive, and might well end up hold­ing con­trolling power over schol­arly com­mu­nic­a­tion and ca­reers, more than tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing ever did. Fos­ter­ing a healthy and vi­brant eco­logy of schol­ar-led journ­als might provide a coun­ter­bal­ance and should be prefer­able.