The History of Scientific Publishing

Before the big business of scientific publishing, papers were often produced by scientific societies on a bit of a shoestring and more afterthought. In the 1940s there was a shift from science being more of an amateur pursuit or pursuit of wealthy gentlemen that could afford it to being a respected profession. So this scientific publishing system we have now, I mean, it's critical. It's a crucial part of academia and industry. And if you take something like Elsevier, which is the biggest science publisher, it's got nearly 3000 journals that are publishing more than 600,000 articles each year. so it's a massive enterprise.