The emergence of scientific publishing

Pursuing the academic path is challenging, especially when the “publish or perish” culture has been embedded in most scholarly communities. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is recognized as the representation of competency by many academic institutions and universities. Researchers often regard it as a way to get recognition, funding, and progress in the field. However, empirical research has shown that although publications in peer-reviewed journals have higher quality than preprints, the difference is small. Meanwhile, the subjective ratings over the clarity of titles, abstracts, and reporting information result in significant differences favoring peer-reviewed articles. This contrast leads to several questions: How have the scholarly communities generally accepted an unspoken rule that a publication in a peer-reviewed journal is of equal quality? Is it good or bad for scientific progress? What are the roles of the Open Access movement in the modern publishing system? It will require a long journey to answer all these questions. In serving the SM3D Portal community, a series of writing will be dedicated to answering these questions, discussing them with cost-benefit and ethical aspects, and offering more detailed reasoning under the lens of information processing. One of the first steps is to understand the origins of modern scientific publishing, which is also the aim of the current essay.