Ask most academics what scientific publishing is for, and you will hear about careers, grants, league tables and citation counts. Those are real consequences, but they are not the reason the system was built. Publishing exists to convert a private finding into public knowledge — something others can inspect, doubt, repeat, correct and extend. That is what sets science apart from business, which profits by withholding information, and from government, which classifies it. A claim only earns its standing once other people have had a chance to pull it apart. The habit was formalised in 1665, when the Royal Society of London began issuing Philosophical Transactions, generally counted as the first scientific journal. Its innovation was procedural rather than intellectual: findings would be recorded openly, kept permanently and made available to anyone who wanted them.
The drift began in the twentieth century, when institutions needed a way to compare people. Papers are countable, citations traceable, journals rankable — so a channel for sharing results quietly became an instrument for grading researchers. Promotion, funding and prestige were all pegged to publication records. The trouble with turning a tool into a target is that the incentive shifts from understanding something to producing evidence that you have. Metrics are proxies for contribution, not the contribution itself.
Today’s tensions follow from that confusion. Visibility now competes with communication, as social media rewards the announcement over the argument. Meanwhile much publicly funded research sits behind subscriptions, so a system designed to circulate knowledge also rations it — hence open access, institutional repositories and preprint servers, all attempts to answer the question the Royal Society was already asking. The next answers may look less like journals altogether: shared datasets, code, protocols and AI-assisted collaboration, closer in spirit to the letter-writing networks science started with, only global.
More than 350 years on, the underlying principle has not moved. Knowledge locked inside one mind, laboratory or institution contributes nothing. Any arrangement that helps ideas travel is doing its job; any arrangement that forgets this — however elegant its metrics or storied its mastheads — has lost the thread.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Adapted from Kishore Paknikar’s column “Why Scientists Publish” (Ideas Matter). Paknikar is an ANRF Prime Minister Professor at COEP Technological University, Pune, and former Director of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune.
