A brief history of the development of scholarly publishing and recent trends

The basic model of scholarly communication in science remained almost unchanged for more than three hundred years, with the paper version of the journal being the only means of distribution. Prior to 1945, such publications were carried out exclusively by scientific communities. Between 1945 and 1970, commercial publishers began to appear increasingly in the field of scientific publishing. By the mid-1990s, commercial publishers were consolidated and the first journals began to be distributed online.

The change to online publishing greatly improved the process of finding the right papers for readers while reducing the cost of distribution. Over the past few decades, however, the transition to digital technology has increased the cost of subscriptions to the point where they often exceed the budgets of libraries and educational organisations, leading to the so-called periodicals crisis. 

One of the solutions of this crisis and the monopoly of publishers has been the Open Access (OA) movement, which aims to enable researchers to retain their intellectual property rights and make their work available to a wider audience, including practitioners and the general public. Open Access and wider dissemination methods ensure that payment does not become a barrier to the advancement of science and to the majority of readers.

However, alongside the Open Access movement has been the rise of predatory publishers - journals that exploit scientists' need to publish, charge high fees but do not review or edit submissions and falsify figures.

So, what trends and changes are expected in the sphere of international scientific publications in the nearest future, according to the scientific community:

   1. Impact of the Nelson Memorandum (Nelson Memo). 

A recent memorandum (August 2022) issued by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy suggests new requirements that will affect research using federal funding. Some key points:

• provide free, immediate (non-embargoed), and equitable access to federally funded research;
• the requirement applies to all federal agencies, including those that funding the humanities and social sciences;
• applies to both peer-reviewed publications and the scientific data underlying them.

2. Target Audience Approach. 

As we move from print to digital publishing, publishers are increasingly attentive to the individual needs of different audiences: authors, reviewers, editors, librarians, policy makers, students, and seek to provide a more personalised approach.

  3. The importance of data. 

Data about people and content offers a wealth of opportunities for publishers, especially those who can structure and analyse it effectively. Therefore, we can expect to see more data-based solutions for problems such as author and reviewer engagement, alerts, personalised content recommendations and audience engagement.

  4. Developments in Artificial Intelligence. 

While there is much controversy surrounding the use of AI in scholarly publishing, there is already tremendous work being done to improve the efficiency of the publishing process, and new advances in the field and open source tools are opening up the opportunity for organisations to apply AI without having to build bespoke models. Today's language models are trained on vast amounts of data and can be customised to perform specific tasks, allowing publishers of all sizes to improve author outreach, content recommendation and more.