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The future journal

SEG Editor 1999–2001

Corresponding author: C. Liner, cliner@seg.org

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The advance of science and technology is facilitated by (some would say due to) the publication of peer-review journals. While the goal of such journals—to deliver top-quality information—has not changed, it is inevitable that their production details are under intense pressure from developments in networking and electronic publication. Will journals disappear or morph into new, more efficient forms? As always, before delving into the future it is instructive to browse through the past.

	History of peer-review

 
Natural history, astronomy, and many other sciences date back to ancient times, but the concept of a scientific journal was born in 1665 with publication of the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Figure 1). This was the venue for disseminating the discoveries and inquiries of a remarkable group of early scientists, including Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley, and Isaac Newton. Although this is a landmark in scientific publishing, it would take a serious stretch of the imagination to consider the early Royal Society Transactions a peer-reviewed journal. There was no systematic policy or protocol in place to have submitted papers scrutinized by fellow scientists for merit or correctness. It was more a matter of the editor screening contributions and the membership responding to them once in print.

View larger version (145K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Title page from volume 1 of the world's first scientific journal (from Internet site of Univer-sity of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Special Collections).