Journalistic Flood

At a recent conference in London, scientific editors, publisher and librarians debated how to protect themselves from the growing deluge of journals. In the British Science Museum library, for example, the number of new journals received is increasing at the rate of about 700 a year! The flood was variously blamed on irresponsible publishers, on an increase in research and on small institutions that hope to acquire good journals free, in exchange for their almost-worthless publications. But most of the blame fell on the scientists themselves, and particularly their habit of republishing the same material several times; first as a preliminary report, then as a paper, and again with minor modifications in congress reports and Symposium volumes.

However this increase in publications has not led to a corresponding increase in reading. One survey indicated that few scientists read more than three or four journals. A delegate at the conference wondered whether science would suffer if scientists were licensed to publish only one paper and one preliminary report per year.