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The Royal Society of London, publisher of seven of the most highly regarded journals in the world, recently announced that they are preparing to go paperless by implementing a continuous publication model. As the Royal Society is also the publisher of the oldest scientific journal in the world, Philosophical Transactions, this is kind of a watershed moment, and one to which smaller publishers, such as SME, must pay close attention.

On the surface, the change is not especially radical. The announcement was actually directed to authors, letting them know that from now on, articles will be identified solely by DOI numbers, rather than by volume and page numbers. This seems like the kind of housekeeping detail that might obsess us fussy editor types while leaving higher thinkers unmoved. After all, they're not even going to discontinue the print journal, at least not right away. But the reality is that the move portends a sea change.

We're seeing the last days of the traditional journal issue - the thing that lands in your mailbox, the contents of which are typically carefully chosen and arranged. Articles and information are now particulate and self-curated; we're moving (or have moved) from publication as an event to publication as a constantly murmuring conversation.

This is important, because according to recent research (well-summarized here), what readers want and what authors want is diametrically opposed: readers want to read less, and authors want them to read more.

What are some of the pros and cons of the emerging model for scientific dialogue as a whole? What will happen when everything is published this way - what will be gained, and what will be lost?

Here are some thoughts.

Advantages: 

• Publication is continuous, with no delays caused by the print publication schedule. A lab completes their research, writes it up, sends it to a journal – and presto, it is processed and goes before the eyes of other scientists. Some journals, such as the open access journal consortium PLOS, even make the review process public. PLOS, for example, will publish any paper that meets a specific set of standards; judging the paper's importance and relevance is left up to the community at large, and comes about through "the number of citations it attracts; the downloads it achieves; the media and blog coverage it receives; and the post-publication Notes, Comments and Ratings that it receives on PLOS ONE etc."
• In theory, this is the best, most natural model, returning the scientific dialogue to something more closely resembling a real conversation. The Curtain of Secrecy behind which the editorial vetting process used to take place – both the decision to send something out for review and the back-and-forth of the peer reviewers themselves – is now open, for the edification of all. This, it seems to me, can only be beneficial. I’ve often wished that I could get reviewers to sit down in a room together to discuss a tricky paper, especially one that comes back with mixed reviews: so, Reviewer 1, you think that this paper needs only minor revision; how would you justify that decision to Reviewer 2, who thinks it should be rejected outright? I’d love to see that dialogue, and I think it could only strengthen and improve the peer review process and, frankly, the final product.
• Continuous publishing returns to the roots of scientific publishing. The birthplace of the technical article was the meeting house of the various scientific societies of Europe, where papers were submitted as letters and a community of scientists read them aloud and discussed them as a group.
• Logistics: papers can be grouped to best effect, and those groupings can be changed, unlike the current model of grouping papers by the fact that they entered the editorial stream in the same unit of time. This could allow papers to display more of their natural give-and-take. If paper B on cyanide leaching is a researched response to paper A, for example, it makes most sense to be able to read it side by side with paper A, even if it was published two years later. 

Disadvantages:

• It is harder to get and keep attention; compared to the Event of the issue, which is like a concert where everyone is expected to sit down and be quiet at a specified time, this mode of publication is just another voice in the continual babble of the internet. One could argue that if an article is important enough, it will generate its own buzz on its own merits. In practice, though, we all know that this is rarely the case: stature breeds attention, and important articles in obscure journals will rarely make it to the public eye.
• It will be harder to publish those important but unexciting papers that are the backbone of the scientific process; these are the papers that warn against leaping to conclusions, or present critical refinements to current practice or technique, or which point out the logical or scientific flaws in the bigger, splashier, quick-and-dirty papers that tend to get the headlines and the site traffic.
• Building a quiet reputation for solid science and attention to detail will be harder in a world dependent on attention spans and catching your eye. Be prepared for the rise of tabloid technical journals.
• No more album effect: if each paper is read separately, unexpected serendipities are more random and less subject to publisher orchestration.
• Publication is a different ball game: creating a successful and visited publication depends less on the traditional markers of technical publication excellence, such as scientific merit and experience of the editors and board members, or even, possibly, on the quality of the articles themselves. Success leans more on external factors, such as the quality of the website on which the journal is housed and, even more troubling for small publishers such as ourselves, the size of the website: for example, if you are looking for research on comminution, will you go to website of the journal that is likely to have one or two very good articles, or to the website of the journal which has twenty articles, some of which are pointless and some of which are decent, and on which you can access the publisher’s vast database of hundreds of other similar journals? Yeah. You’ll go to the hostess with the mostess.

It's a brave new world, and some days it's hard to see where small society publications will fit in. Where once a small journal that was well-regarded and was associated with leaders in the field could compete (one print journal is very like any other print journal), a small online journal has immeasurable handicaps when competing with a giant corporation. We lack the technological capacity to command attention and change quickly. We lack the ability to bring extras to the table, like search capacity. It remains to be seen if we can survive.

Emily Wortman-Wunder is the managing editor of technical publications at the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration, Inc., including Minerals & Metallurgical Processing, Transactions and the technical section of Mining Engineering.