The next 75 years

With this issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society we come to the end of our 75th year of publication.Since our first issue in 1938, the world of periodical publishing in the history of science, technology and medicine has undergone profound changes.Many new journals have been founded, bringing the number of leading titles in the field to more than even the 61 that added their name to the protest against the European Research Index in the Humanities in 2009, the ill-starred initiative that sought to classify journals according to highly contestable criteria. 1And journals have grown substantially bigger.The oldest general periodical in our field, Isis, published 376 pages of articles and reviews in that year, distributed between two issues; in 2012, its hundredth year, its four issues ran to a total of 836 pages, in addition to its annual critical bibliography of almost 4000 items (compared with roughly one-third of that number in the two critical bibliographies of 1938).Proliferation and expansion of this kind show no sign of slowing.But changes of a more fundamental kind are now sweeping through the world of scholarly publishing.The move to online publishing has already imposed a rethinking of the future of the hard-copy journal, so costly to produce and so greedy for space on library shelves.The attractions of this new departure are understandable: articles published online, without waiting to be gathered between the covers of an issue, reach their readers sooner than they do by the traditional route.The current push towards Open Access, by which journals make their articles freely available online either immediately on publication ('Gold' Open Access) or allow authors to make a version of their paper available online after a short embargo period ('Green' Open Access), is also challenging current practices and accelerating the publishing process.Ensuring that knowledge is accessible promptly to any who care to acquire it is an admirable ideal, of course.However, we need to reflect carefully on the implications, not least for authors who (from their own pockets or the funds provided through their institutions or funding agencies) would be required to pay the fees to make Open Access financially possible.Such a model may well work for the sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences it is fraught with dangers.As a recent session, 'The future of journals in the history of science, technology, and medicine', at the XXIVth International Congress of History of Science in Manchester showed, editors, authors, publishers and librarians face the next two or three years, let alone the next 75, with apprehension.How will learned societies whose income depends so heavily on subscriptions to their journals adjust to having their wares made easily and quickly available to all?And will commercial publishing houses be willing to continue supporting titles for which subscriptions might begin to decline as part of the same process?Is there a risk that, as Open Access advances and electronic editions gain favour, editors and their advisory boards will be reduced to the status of remote agents in the passage of articles as fast as possible from submission to computer screens across the world?In those circumstances

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