Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2013

Abstract

Recent decades have seen extensive changes in how researchers in the sciences work. Online platforms enabled by Web 2.0 technologies (collectively known as “open” or “networked” science) have created multiple new channels for informal communications, revolutionizing the ways in which scientists collaborate and share results. Meanwhile, digitization and open access publishing have brought fundamental change to modes of publication and distribution for scientific journals. Yet the primary vehicle for the formal publication of results, the scientific article, has been much slower to alter in format. This paper will examine the functions that peer-reviewed journals have served within the scientific community since the founding of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, and the reasons for the remarkable stability and persistence over time of the journal system. It will also chart the development of the rhetoric of scientific discourse from its early author-centered approach to later object- and method-centered formats, leading to the highly structured research articles of the twentieth century. The evidence suggests that informal communication has been quick to adapt to the networked environment of contemporary research and is growing in importance for working scientists. The journal article, meanwhile, remains the format of choice for purposes of the professional record, much as books were when journals first appeared.

Comments

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Information and Culture: A Journal of History following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available through the University of Texas Press.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.