Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

The current publishing regime emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, when the pace of discovery was glacial by twenty-first-century standards. Scientific journals provided the primary infrastructure for scholarly communication and collaboration. Apart from annual academic symposiums, journals were the place where scientists could find out about, engage with, and carefully critique each other's work. Publishing journals was expensive, entailing significant capital and operational costs.

As the scientific endeavor swells in scale and speed, however, a growing number of participants in the scientific ecosystem are questioning whether the antiquated journal system is adeuate to satisfy their needs. New communication technologies render paper-based publishing obsolete. The traditional peer-reviewed journal system is already being augmented, if not superseded, by increasing amounts of peer-to-peer collaboration.