ABSTRACT
Dissemination of results is one of the critical steps in the practice of science, and today’s scientists do this in many forms: through presentations at conferences, invited lectures, and most importantly through publication. Publication in its simplest form means merely the dissemination of resultscommunication. Scientific publishing is fundamentally different from publication in that sense in that it involves an element of review and permanency. This difference between scientific publishing and general publishing was established by Henry Oldenburg, who, as the Secretary of the Royal Society, established the oldest scientific journal in the English language, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (only the French Journal des sçavans is older in any language, first published on January 5 1665). The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions was edited by Oldenburg and published on March 6 1665. In it he laid out four functions for publication: (1) dissemination, (2) registration, (3) certification, and (4) archiving (what is called the “Minutes of Science”). How these intersect with the needs and desires of the authors of such publications is laid out in Table 8.1. Oldenburg sent papers submitted to the Philosophical Transactions to other scientists for review, the first instance of peer-review, today the cornerstone of scientific publishing. Publishing in the 17th century was set in the context of concern over what today we might call intellectual property; authors were concerned with receiving credit for work they had done (Guédon, 2001), and for its dissemination to others beyond the reach of local scientific gatherings. These issues are still relevant today, but in the present research environment authors also expect rapid publication and that necessarily means rapid peer-review.
