How journals can survive and thrive in an age of innovation and disruption

Abstract

Despite the acceleration of change in publishing at every level, journals still remain at the core of the dissemination of scientific research. They are intertwined with research assessment, rewards, and incentives and can influence policy and practice at international and especially at national levels. In this article, drawn from the talk that I gave at NISO 2024 Global Conference, I take the opportunity to reflect on what journals need to do to thrive in an open and rapidly changing world and to consider what their future role will be as disruption in publishing continues.

Introduction

We are in very uncertain times. That was true in 2024, and in early 2025, as this is written, that is even more so, given events in the U.S.A. and indeed globally. When I discussed my talk online in 2024 someone commented that they were confident about the future of dissemination, but not about the future of journals per se. I took that as a challenge that we must be more intentional about the future of journals; as misinformation spreads, it is incumbent upon us all to think critically about what journals do, why they do it, and their role in society. In this paper I will use my personal experience of publishing at three journals to reflect on this.

My background in publishing began at The Lancet in 1999 which, then as now, was a large, prestigious journal with an international reach, and hence one that has been able to set the agenda in many different ways. But even in 1999, things were changing, and critically, one of the things that The Lancet, despite being innovative in many ways, did not do was embrace open access. And to be honest, it never really has. One of the reasons that I left The Lancet in 2004 was because I believed passionately in open access to health information, and had the opportunity at the Public Library of Science (PLOS), along with Gavin Yamey, who is now at Duke University, and Barbara Cohen, who was previously the editor of Nature Genetics, to start an open access journal, PLOS Medicine.

PLOS – and PLOS Medicine specifically – was on a mission to change the world. We were a small journal, but we believed that we could influence the wider global health system. ¹ Following my time at PLOS, and after moving to Australia, I shifted to working on open access policy at a small advocacy organisation, Open Access Australasia. At the beginning of 2023, I returned to journals when I was privileged to be appointed to be Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA). I was interested in the role, given the potential importance of national journals in their national medical ecosystem. National journals can, and should, be highly influential locally. As a colleague who had worked in places where national medical journals do not exist observed, medical journals are a critical part of a healthy civil society. The different perspectives of these three journals, and how they fulfil that role in society, have clarified for me the challenges that journals face today.

Lessons from the emergence of journals

There is a lesson for us in the distant past of publishing in what journals need to do to survive and thrive. Journals started back in the 17th century, when two journals appeared within a short period of time of each other in 1665. Original discussions at these journals and their intentions sound both familiar and innovative in regard what we now recognise as core roles of journals. Le Journal des scavans, ² apparently the first academic journal to be published in 1665, had as one of its stated purpose ‘to publish findings from experiments in physics and chemistry, new discoveries in the arts and Sciences such as machines and useful or curious inventions of mathematicians, celestial meteorological observations, and new anatomical findings made on animals’. Reading this description is reminiscent of the mega journals that we are familiar with today.

Three months later the Philosophical Transactions emerged. ³ This journal’s aims were in fact in its title: ‘Philosophical Transactions Giving Some Account of the Present Understanding, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World’. And critically, the journal aimed to be ‘a collective notebook between scientists’ – an early nod to the idea of the important role of journals in fostering collaboration.

The journals I have been involved in span three centuries and all also set out their aims at their beginning. In 1823, when the Lancet was launched, ⁴ its aim was to ‘offer to public notice to a work calculated as we conceive to supply in the most simple manner whatever is valuable in these most important branches of knowledge’. The MJA, as it currently exists, emerged in 1914 and in the original editorial at that time its aim was to ‘record the progress of scientific medicine to assist in rendering the practice of Medicine in all its branches of the greatest benefit to the people of Australia’.

In 2004, when PLOS Medicine launched, our stated aim was about much more than open access. We started our inaugural editorial with these words: ‘the possibilities for a medical journal are almost limitless'. We aimed to publish papers ‘reporting a substantial advance in any specialty, but also where the global medical community can discuss together what matters to them’. These two aims were very important – the latter a nod back to the aims of the Philosophical Transactions.

I remain convinced that journals have limitless possibilities. But to be successful journals must perform two essential functions – dissemination and informed discussion. Everything that they do, be it technical issues such as registration and archiving, or the processes of peer review and quality control are aligned with these functions and are core to the future of journals which I will discuss below.

What do journals need to do to thrive in 2024 and beyond?

Acknowledge and understand the environment in which they exist

Journals cannot publish everything. In 2023 according to STM ⁵ there were approximately 3.6 million articles published – almost certainly an underestimate. And any journal is a pretty small part of that publishing landscape – for example, at the MJA we publish around 250 papers a year, which is about 0.007% of the world’s literature. In the wider information ecosystem, an individual journal is even smaller. English Wikipedia, for example, had 92 billion visits in 2023. ⁶ Not all of this information on Wikipedia is academic, but we do know that if any academic term is typed into a search engine, the very first one that is likely to come up is from Wikipedia. It is an important part of the academic dissemination mechanism.

If we then consider the number of individuals who are involved in disseminating information, journals are an even smaller part of the information ecosystem. In 2024, it is estimated there were more than five billion social media accounts. ⁷ Again, of course, not all of those social media accounts are spreading information in relation to academic research, not even to medical research, but many of them are. Hence, the role of any individual journal in this whole system is very small and we must be realistic about how we can influence the information ecosystem as it exists now.

And this, of course, is at a time where trust in science, medicine and publishing is fragile. Retraction Watch ⁸ has been tracking the various misdeeds in publishing since 2010, not just about retractions, but about a whole range of issues, and this sheds light on trust within the system. So, for example, there are more than four hundred papers that have been retracted that published on COVID-19. ⁹ Exactly at a time when we hoped that the publishing system was really robust, it turned out that we must look at it with a much more critical eye. Unfortunately, we also know that even if you are a Nobel Prize winner, that does not protect you against having papers retracted. ¹⁰

What is even worse is that we know that these papers are being cited and influencing other papers. On top of that, an even bigger problem is one that we are beginning to understand - the problem of paper mills and how this has led to an enormous number of papers coming into the research system. These papers are at best poor quality and at worst, fabricated.^11,12

Collaborate with our communities against threats to the integrity of publishing

So how are we going to address these issues of volume and quality? As research professionals and as research information professionals in particular, we must collaborate against the threats to the integrity of publishing journal.

There are a number of organisations that collaborate on both editorial and author facing initiatives: COPE for editors; ¹³ Think Check Submit, especially aimed at less experienced authors ¹⁴ ; and the Directory of Open Access Journals ¹⁵ that provides a place of validation of open access journals. All of these organisation help academics to have trust in the journals that they publish in. There is also a role for local journal organisations such the Asia-Pacific Association of Medical Journal Editors (APAME) ¹⁶ which in 2024 developed a discussion paper and an editorial on predatory or pseudo journals and publishers. ¹⁷ The role here for journals is both to guard their own processes and to broadcast the problems that sit within our research system and, especially, not to try to hide them.

Champion innovation

Journals have quite a specific role in championing innovation, and it is important that they do it systematically and in ways that are relevant to their communities.

The first area in which to champion innovation is around policy. Clinical trial registration is a great example of this. It is now a norm within medical journals, but it took the concerted action of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, back in 2005, working together to do this – it could not have been done at an individual journal level. ¹⁸

The second way that journals can champion innovation is through new models. medrXiv, ¹⁹ an initiative of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the BMJ, is a great example of an innovation that changed our thinking about how medical research could be disseminated. There were preprint servers before medRxiv began in 2019, the first one being arXiv ²⁰ primarily for physics and computer science, but preprints for medicine was new. Initially, it was not something that other medical journals or medical academics really wanted to champion. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, it became incredibly important, and preprints went from being something that was a fringe idea to something that is now an integral part of publishing, not just in medicine, but across a number of different disciplines.

The third area in which for journals can champion innovation is in vision. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science ²¹ is an enormous global initiative that has changed our thinking on a global scale around the idea of open, not just being for open access to research papers, but as integral to the whole scholarly ecosystem. But underpinning such visions, there must be practical action and monitoring, such as, a new initiative from PLOS, the Open Science Indicators. ²² These indicators demonstrate a range of actions including, whether there are data sharing statements or whether there is open code. Individual journals can both start and champion these actions.

A further area to champion is around infrastructure, a key one being for persistent identifiers, not only for DOIs for papers, ²³ but also for individuals ²⁴ and now for research activities. ²⁵ The role for journals here is to be aware of such initiatives and to build them into their processes where possible.

A final area of innovation to champion is that of standards. NISO is a clear leader in this area. ²⁶ Journals need to be part of the discussions around how these standards are developed and how they are implemented.

Tell the stories that matter

My fourth area is about story telling. This is something that I have become more and more convinced about, particularly at a local level. As humans, we change our behaviour based on stories. Journals, particularly journals that have a clear mission and understand their audience, can be powerful storytellers.

There are few examples recently that have struck me. In Australia in 2024 a legal ban was implemented on engineered stone, a material that is used to make kitchen benchtops. ²⁷ Anyone who has had a kitchen built recently will probably have one in their kitchen. The problem with engineered stone is that when it is cut, it causes fine dust that if inhaled can cause silicosis. About one in four workers who are exposed to this engineered stone get silicosis. That’s an appalling rate of occupational injury. In 2024, the Australian government banned its use and also banned its import. So how did this come about? Well, of course, there are many organisations involved, but the MJA had a role. The first case history of an individual in a medical journal in Australia of this silicosis was published in the MJA in 2017 ²⁸ and that helped to bring this disease to national attention.

The journal followed on with a narrative review on occupational lung diseases, published in that same year, 2017. ²⁹ And then the MJA was part of conversations about the need to learn from this, which led to discussions about an Australian Occupational Disease Registry, ³⁰ and what that should look like. Now, not only do we have a ban on engineered stone, but this registry is in place. ³¹

What this shows is the multiple roles of journals in advocacy. It may begin with documenting through the publishing of the version of record of the first identification of a particular issue; the documentation then continues as the journal publishes further on that issue throughout its development.

We also need to publish the stories that are uncomfortable. An example from 2023 that was published in the MJA was a series of papers on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study. ³² This is a large body of papers with a shocking headline finding that nearly one quarter of Australians have experienced child maltreatment.

Other examples of important advocacy at an individual level include the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, especially David Isaacs, one of the previous editors of that, who was constant in reminding the Australian government of the need to treat refugees and asylum seekers fairly. ³³

Be allies and advocates

Another key role for journals is to be allies and advocates. At the MJA we have as a focus to raise the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers and to champion excellence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health – essentially to change the paradigm that we currently have at the moment, which is that research about Indigenous people is done on them as opposed to being done by and in consultation with them. We want to support the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health researchers, to empower them to both do research and to publish it.

This is a different approach to what we have done in the past. The MJA has published a lot of research on Indigenous health, but it has until recently been by non-Indigenous researchers. And that has led to a fundamental power imbalance. I believe that one of the things that western journals such as the MJA have to do is to understand these power dynamics, their privilege in this space, and to deliberately step aside and empower those affected by this fundamental power imbalance. ³⁴

Other journals do similar things. In a paper, Safeguarding LGBTQ+ lives in an epoch of abandonment, published in Lancet Global Health, threats to LGBTQ+ individuals are highlighted. ³⁵ Some would argue whether this is a health issue, but clearly it is both a human rights issue and a health issue and that is something where medical journals have an essential duty to comment on.

It can be hard for journals to decide the areas for which they are going to advocate. Journals do not have capacity to advocate for everything, but for those that they do, they not only should do it vigorously, but also advocate in alliance with those they want to advocate for.

For example, for journals that are involved in supporting Indigenous health research and researchers, it is very important not to assume that journals can speak for these groups, but rather it must be done in consultation with these groups.

Be open to alternative views

The final thing we must be open to is alternative ways of thinking. This has been on my mind as I have been thinking about what the role of the MJA is and how that sits within its national context.

In reflecting on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research and Indigenous Health research more widely, what is clear is that we have much to learn from these Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. More broadly, it is crucial to recognise that the ways that many of us who work in western norms have been doing research and publishing research in the past have not served parts of the population well, if at all. A relatively new journal The Lowitja Journal ³⁶ is an exemplar here. It is published by the Lowitja Institute, ³⁶ the only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Controlled Health Research Institute in Australia. The Lowitja journal is entirely run by Indigenous researchers and has changed for me the way that I have thought about how research needs to be published because it challenges the kind of traditional norms of how we currently publish research. The key way that it has done that is by ensuring that the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other Indigenous researchers are privileged– in the authorship, the editorial board, the people that review for it, and in the papers that get published. One of the things that I have come to understand is that there are multiple ways of doing research, and that as the Lowitja journal’s instructions to authors say, ‘the knowledge systems of First Nations people developed over millennia to underpin thriving and healthy communities, offer solutions to the survival and flourishing of our people’.

We can extend this approach to other considerations in knowledge dissemination, as highlighted in this talk for Open Access week in 2022 by Dr Dalila Gharbaoui. ³⁷ She emphasised the need to begin with co-design, such that if you are doing research in a population, you consult with that population very early on not only what the research is, but also how that research should be done, who should be involved in it, how the research should be written up, and then how it should be translated and how that research is reported back to the community itself. It is research as a whole ecosystem.

Conclusion

I have outlined here how I believe that journals are to thrive and survive in this time of intense change. We need to know and adapt to our journals' environment, we must collaborate, we must innovate, we need to tell the important stories, be allies and advocates, and then be open to alternative ways of thinking. Above all, journals need to be bold in what they do – if they are not, they risk becoming irrelevant. I do not believe that it is a predetermined future, but I believe that it is a possible future if we do not think carefully.