Present and future of scientific journals

Abstract

Evolution of scientific journals in the last 40 years and analysis of their current situation considering the 4 factors that are conditioning their evolution and future: 1) movement towards open access, that advances inexorably, 2) great competition with other information channels (repositories, blogs, social networks), as well as between the journals themselves, and especially the mega-journals, 3) piracy (predatory journals andSci-Hub), and 4) quality. Depending on how "essential" certain titles are, the vast majority of journals that currently are financed by subscriptions will need to be open access and financed by charging the authors. The journals that have not been indexed by the two databases that the accreditation agencies take as reference and quality rankings (Web of Scienceand Scopus) will not be sufficiently attractive for the authors, so they have an uncertain future, unless they are subsidized by a university or other type of institution. In this case, they will play a secondary (though not less important) role in the dissemination of science and pedagogy, but they will probably not publish original research.