The internet has had an incredible impact on our daily lives and its effects on the academic publishing industry cannot be overstated. The ability to read accepted manuscripts before they appear in print, search the literature for similar studies, and reach potentially millions of readers are clearly beneficial and have promoted the dissemination of science at a speed that was not previously possible.
Before the internet, the only way to get a science manuscript that was not carried by your department or university was to submit a written request for a copy to a library, or for a reprint to the author directly. The author would then send you a reprint of their paper – one of the 20 or so bound hardcopies of their manuscript that they received from the journal.
The benefits of this system were that it promoted correspondence and collaboration between authors, they could see which labs and researchers were interested in their work, and they could infer the value of their work by how many reprint requests they received. The process was slow, but it was personal.
Things have changed a lot since then. Today we rely on citation indexes to gauge the influence of papers, we download papers in PDF format from the journal directly, and correspondence between authors at this stage is no longer necessary. Clearly, the internet-based approach is faster and more efficient, but sometimes reflecting on what the new system replaced is also worth considering.
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