LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

PNAS rebrand: Improving accessibility in its many forms

Photo from wikipedia

On January 7, 1997, 82 years and 6 days after Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was published (1), Volume 94, along with the… Click to show full abstract

On January 7, 1997, 82 years and 6 days after Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was published (1), Volume 94, along with the November and December 1996 issues, were published as the first online issues of the journal. With the appearance of Volume 119 online in January 2022, PNAS marks a quartercentury of electronic publishing. This anniversary year was in part a motivation for a rebranding and major makeover, not as a celebration of longevity but rather as an opportunity to take advantage of technological advances in digital publishing and to align with and promote shifts in societal values, particularly those relating to the democratization of science as a global enterprise and the increasing permeability of disciplinary boundaries. In 1915, the members of the National Academy of Sciences who proposed the creation of a new journal envisioned a multifaceted mission, as articulated by George Ellery Hale (1), to bring “researches in one department of science to the attention of scholars in other departments, who would otherwise fail to see them,” to achieve a “wide foreign circulation,” and to “contribute to the popularization of scientific researches.” As brilliant as they might have been, these founders couldn’t possibly have imagined how scientific publishing would change over the next 100 years. In 1915, for example, “wide foreign circulation” was an elusive goal; at that time, the four leading American journals of biology had “an average paid foreign circulation of 93 copies (maximum 109, minimum 77)” and the plan to expand the international reach of PNAS was to stress “placing the Proceedings in the leading research centers, including university department libraries when these are of sufficient significance” (1). At that time, the world inventory of universities was in the neighborhood of 200 (https://www.infoplease. com/us/education/major-universities-founded-1900). Today, there are more than 24,000 universities in the world (https:// www.statista.com/statistics/918403/number-of-universitiesworldwide-by-country/), with 1,400 universities across 92 countries considered “of sufficient significance” to be included in the 2020 Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020 (https://www.timeshighereducation. com/world-university-rankings/2020/world-ranking#!/page/ 0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats). For its first 90 years or so, PNAS succeeded in fulfilling its mission with the tools of the 20th century, but digital publishing has evolved far more rapidly than has print publishing and has been key to expanding the journal’s goals of overcoming barriers to disseminating scientific knowledge presented by time, distance, and economics. In the winter of 1996, the first online manuscript tracking system was installed. In 1999, PNAS was redesigned with a new cover and online features for the millennium (2, 3). In 2003, the online submission and peer review system (https:// www.pnascentral.org/cgi-bin/main.plex) was launched. The electronic journal became the version of record, with Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Cozzarelli (4) predicting in 2003 that “PNAS may someday become a paperless journal.” A website redesign in 2004 commensurate with its new status as a digital-first journal followed, as did another web redesign in 2015. That year, formal print subscriptions ceased (5); Cozzarelli’s “someday” arrived in 2019, when the print version of the journal was discontinued and PNAS became an exclusively electronic journal. Whereas earlier web redesigns helped to overcome time and distance barriers, in 2020 a platform migration inspired a web redesign to move away from lingering historical conventions of paper publishing and capitalize on the special strengths of digital communication, particularly those enabling greater usability of the journal for a larger and much more diverse population of authors and readers than had ever existed before. Digital publishing has enabled PNAS to be personalized in a way that print publication never could be. Key to making PNAS more user-friendly and May R. Berenbaum.

Keywords: time; journal; publishing; world; https www; pnas

Journal Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year Published: 2022

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.