Forum, Volume 42, Number 1

Traditional printed journals are a familiar and comfortable aspect of scholarly work. They have been the primary means of communicating research results, and as such have performed an invaluable service. However, they are an awkward artifact, although a highly developed one, of the print technology that was the only means available over the last few centuries for large-scale communication. The growth of the scholarly literature, together with the rapidly increasing power and availability of electronic technology, are creating tremendous pressures on journals. The purpose of this article is to give a broad picture of these pressures and their likely outcome, and to argue that the coming changes may be abrupt. It is often thought that changes will be incremental, with perhaps a few electronic journals appearing and further use of e-mail, ftp, etc. My guess is that change will be far more drastic. Traditional scholarly journals will likely disappear within ten to twenty years. The electronic alternatives will be different from current periodicals, even though they may carry the same titles. There are obvious dangers in discontinuous change away from a system that has served the scholarly community well [Quinn]. However, I am convinced that future systems of communication will be much better than the traditional journals. Although the transition may be painful, there is the promise of a substantial increase in the effectiveness of scholarly work. Publications delays will disappear, and reliability of the literature will increase with opportunities to add comments to papers and attach references to later works that cite them. This promise of improved communication is especially likely to be realized if we are aware of the issues and plan the evolution away from the present system as early as possible. In any event, we do not have much choice because drastic change is inevitable no matter what our preferences are. Predictions and comments in this article apply to most scholarly disciplines. However, I will write primarily about mathematics, because I am most familiar with that field, and the data that I have is clearest for it. Different areas have varying needs and cultures and are likely to follow somewhat different paths in the evolution of their communications.