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interfaces which had begun to take the research article beyond a mere
facsimile of the printed page, and to allow linking through to
multimedia, online datasets and other supplementary material. These
can mash up and re-present data from a variety of sources. This is all
the more impressive when you consider that about half of the world's
journals are published by society publishers and, of these, over 97%
publish three or fewer journals, with almost 90% publishing just one
title (Crow, 2006).
Open Access
There are other outside influences too. Funders and research institutions
are wishing to exert more influence over the research that they are
associated with, and this has led to a number of Open Access (OA)
mandates of various kinds. There is also a powerful, well funded OA
lobby that benefits from emotive arguments, and this in turn has led to
support from governments - particularly those without a publishing
industry - supporting calls for free access to research without, perhaps,
fully understanding all of the implications. In general, though,
researchers, to the annoyance of the OA lobbyists and as evidenced by
the low take-up of OA publishing and self-archiving, are happy with
the established system.
Why is this? Perhaps they understand - possibly more than the
publishers themselves - the value that publishers add in dealing with
things like information overload.
Information overload
Early journal publishing
Information overload is nothing new; it has been an issue since the
beginning of modern scholarly endeavour. Early scholarly
communication relied on the exchange of letters between intellectuals,
but the first scholarly journals to emerge in Europe, Journal des Sçavans
and Philosophical Transactions , both first published in 1665, collated
accounts of interesting observations and discoveries and circulated these
to a much wider audience.
Peer review began in Philosophical Transactions , published by the Royal
Society, as an attempt by Henry Oldenburg (the Society's first Secretary,
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