Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 60612, USA.
FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2018 Jul 1;365(14). doi: 10.1093/femsle/fny130.
Scientific journals have virtually disappeared as subscription-based familiar paper copies. These have been replaced by article by article access on internet sites (either subscription based paid for by libraries in multi-journal often million dollar 'Big Deal' packages or by author prepayments of thousand dollars 'article processing fees' (Omary and Lawrence, Dealing with rising publication costs. The Scientist 2017;31:29-31), followed by open access. The result appears to be the death of the traditional scientific journal as a familiar means of communication, after nearly 350 years from the time of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke (for two early microbiology examples). Rather than journals with page numbers, individual reports are accessed using titles or manuscript file code numbers. This commentary is knowingly provocative, describing the rapidly changing situation in scientific publication at the beginning of the 21st century and predicting a bad future, basically the end of the long-time most-used vehicles for scientific communication, the paper scientific journal with volumes and pages. This view is not particular to this author and appears frequently today (e.g. The Scientist 2012; https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/10/26/revisiting-why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/). This negative conclusion offers no better possibilities, as it is concluded that it is already too late and too far along this pathway for any meaningful middle ground. This commentary is intended for a broad group of potential readers, including authors and readers of this journal (who are active microbial scientists who need to adapt to individual manuscript identification numbers replacing page numbers), as well as the larger community interested broadly in scientific communication, and even our institutional librarians (who have experienced the disappearance of paper copies from their shelves, and especially unsustainable rapid increases in money costs at a time of very limited resources).
科学期刊已几乎完全消失，不再以订阅为基础发行传统的纸质副本。这些期刊已经被互联网上的文章访问方式所取代（要么是图书馆通过多份期刊的大型“交易”订阅付费，费用可能高达数百万美元，要么是作者预先支付数千美元的“文章处理费”，由 Omary 和 Lawrence 在《应对不断上涨的出版成本》一文中讨论），随后是开放获取。这似乎导致传统的科学期刊作为一种熟悉的交流方式在近 350 年后（从 Anton van Leeuwenhoek 和 Robert Hooke 的时代开始）走向消亡。与带有页码的期刊不同，现在需要使用标题或手稿文件代码号来访问单个报告。本评论有意具有煽动性，描述了 21 世纪初科学出版的快速变化情况，并预测了一个糟糕的未来，基本上是长期以来科学交流最常用的载体——带有卷号和页码的纸质科学期刊的终结。这种观点并非作者所独有，如今经常出现（例如，The Scientist 2012；https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/10/26/revisiting-why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/）。这种消极的结论并没有提供更好的可能性，因为它得出的结论是，沿着这条道路已经走得太远、太晚了，不可能有任何有意义的中间立场。本评论面向广泛的潜在读者群体，包括本期刊的作者和读者（他们是活跃的微生物科学家，需要适应替代页码的单个手稿识别号），以及对科学传播广泛感兴趣的更大社区，甚至包括我们的机构图书馆员（他们经历了纸质副本从书架上消失，而且在资源非常有限的情况下，成本却在迅速增加，这是不可持续的）。
