The Journal of the Future and the Curation of Scientific Information (Invited Presentation)

Before a few decades ago, scientific journals had changed little in structure for well over a century. In the 1990s, the rise of electronic publishing allowed much more effective dissemination of the journal content, but in nearly every way, the basic format remained unchanged. Even today, a scientific journal article looks very much like one that might have been published many years ago, other than being displayed on a screen instead of printed on paper. As part of its work on Centennial Initiatives leading up to the 100th anniversary of AMS, a new framework was explored for the role of societies like AMS in the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. In this envisioned framework, the society “curates” scientific knowledge across a spectrum of sources and platforms, using its longstanding role in peer-review and other forms of vetting to provide measures of reliability for the content, and allowing the society’s imprimatur to signal to users that they can trust the scientific knowledge assembled in that framework. The scientific journal provides the foundation for this framework, and the peer-reviewed journal article can form the center of a hub of related content that expands the utility of the research that is reported in it. This talk will explore the notion of scientific societies as curators of scientific information and will provide a vision for the journal of the future based on these concepts.