Scientific Publishing: Education as the Key Enabler for the Transition to Open Science

Published since the late 1600s, scholarly journals today are the products of a large industry comprised of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, mostly based in western Europe and North America, whose annual income exceeds $25 billion ($10 billion for English-language scientific, technical and medical journals). Originally created for facilitating scientific communication, the Web in principle makes scientific journals no longer necessary. Yet, in an almost opposite fashion to what happened in retail publishing, the academic publishing industry has further flourished following the advent of the internet. Education of today’s students and young researchers, we argue in this study, is the key enabler for the transition to open science.