What the digitalisation of scholarly publishing has changed

Traditional scholarly publications have undergone massive changes due to digitalisation. The impact of digitisation has changed our perception of scholarly publications and made life easier for academics and editors in several ways.

  1. Time savings. Due to the digitalisation of the publishing process, the time taken to publish has been significantly reduced. A user-friendly and customised content management system speeds up the whole process. This, in turn, means a shorter dissemination period of a research paper from submission to distribution.
  2. Broad coverage. Searching for a specific research paper in printed format is a time-consuming task, while digital technologies facilitate and speed up access to the necessary information. This is very important because the accessibility of a research paper determines its global reach and impact.

Finding research papers is now made easier through indexing and specialised services and makes them more searchable online. Some of the different types of indexing services include:

• search engines for scholarly content, such as Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic;
• discipline-specific databases for indexing, such as MEDLINE, PubMed for biomedical information;
• an online catalogue of peer-reviewed Open Access journals, e.g. DOAJ.

 3. AI tools for personalised information retrieval. It is roughly estimated that about 1 million new scientific academic papers are published every year. This is equivalent to one entry every 30 seconds, i.e. a huge data stream.

With AI-based tools, it has become possible to quickly look through millions of academic records and find what you need in no time and eliminates the need to manually extract data for research.

The digitalisation of scholarly publishing continues to open up new opportunities in publishing. In the near future, we may see personalised publishing processes and solutions, the rise of Open Access journals and more efficient peer review.