Editor's note
Scientific and technological innovation and technological revolution are constantly affecting the development process of society. In the field of science and technology journal publishing, how to apply emerging science and technology technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, 5G, cloud computing, blockchain, etc., continuously enhance the publishing service capabilities of scientific and technological journals, and strengthen paradigm innovation has always attracted much attention. Editor-in-chief Shen Xibin conducted in-depth research on several trends that promote the innovative development of future scientific and technological journals. As the phased result of the "2020 China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan Selection and Breeding of High-level Talents and Sub-Project-Youth Talent Support Project (2020ZZ110304)" - "Investigation and Research on the Service Form and Implementation Path of Science and Technology Journal Knowledge in Open Science Environment", it was published in the 2021 Issue 2 of "Journal of Editors". Here, we invite them to share with readers the main views and related thoughts about the research results.
Author: Shen Xibin Liu Hongxia Wang Haijuan Zhu Yao Yuan Qing Li Peng Wang Lilei Zhu Suqi Liu Bing Wei Junmin
First author profile: Shen Xibin, editor and director of the New Media Department of the Chinese Medical Association; member of the 4th Medical Journal Professional Committee of the Chinese Journal Editorial Society, member of the Medical and Health Special Committee of the Central Committee of the Jiusan Society, and industry expert of the "National Key Laboratory of Digital Publishing Technology" of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, and head of the " China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan Selection and Breeding Talents Project-Youth Talent Support Project".
Technological innovation and scientific and technological revolution have continuously influenced the development process of society and have gradually become key variables that affect and change the world economic pattern. in the science and technology journal publishing industry actively responded to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s call to “continuously advance to the breadth and depth of science and technology” [1], and continued to consider how to apply emerging science and technology technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, 5G, cloud computing, blockchain, etc., continuously enhance the publishing service capabilities of science and technology journals, and strengthen paradigm innovation, so as to achieve a qualitative leap in my country’s science and technology journals.
Reviewing the development of Chinese science and technology journals in the past 20 years, we have a little regret that many journals have missed the opportunities for journal development by two major technological progress: In the field of digital publishing, misses structured documents and related digital publishing technologies to transform the intensive management model and content production of scientific and technological journals; In the field of content communication, does not grasp the basic technical support role of Internet technology in the dissemination of science and technology journals, and creates a high-profile and reputational science and technology journal communication platform. Especially in the dissemination of English journals, most journals still need to "borrow a ship to go to sea" so far. Survey data from Ren Shengli and others show that among the 180 English journals funded by the Excellence Action Plan, there are 149 journals that cooperate with foreign publishing institutions, accounting for 82.8%, which fully demonstrates the absence of my country's scientific and technological journal publishing platform.
But fortunately, The breakthrough achievements and good technical foundation of my country in the field of scientific and technological innovation have provided a fertile soil for rapid growth for the innovative progress of scientific and technological journals. Today, China's overall scientific and technological level has moved to the world's first-class echelon, and is becoming a major and powerful country in the world's scientific and technological paper output. The international paper output has been ranked second in the world for more than ten consecutive years, and the quality of papers has also increased year by year. In addition, various favorable policies for Chinese science and technology journals have followed one after another. The policy guidance, financial support and evaluation system reform of the Party Central Committee and competent departments have driven a significant improvement in the academic organizational strength, talent cohesion, innovation leadership and international influence of science and technology journals.
The wind is good and it is time to set sail. Leveraging the ability and strength of scientific and technological progress and national policies to empower China's scientific and technological journals, catching up with and even surpassing international scientific and technological publishing giants is the trust and hope that the times have delivered to the people of science and technology journals.In order to achieve the main goal of "China's comprehensive strength of science and technology journals must leap to the first echelon in the world, the influence and voice of science and technology evaluation will be significantly improved, and it will become an important hub for world academic exchanges and scientific and cultural dissemination" [2], we must fully understand the substantial changes brought by technological breakthroughs to science and technology journals, and must constantly summarize them in practice and move forward in summary and reflection. The following seven major trends are some simple thoughts brought by our work practice and industry cognition in recent years. We hope to reach a consensus with all our colleagues.
1. "People-centered" will give birth to a paradigm revolution in scientific and technological journals
As a world-leading academic and professional publishing industry organization, the International Federation of Science, Technology and Medical Publishers (STM) has more than 140 members from more than 20 countries. The original articles published by its member units each year account for more than 2/3 of the total number of journal papers published worldwide, and tens of thousands of monographs and reference books are published every year. Since 2013, its STM Future group has released technical trend reports on the field of academic publishing every year. The theme of the latest report is "Focus on the user" [3]. The report shows the hot topics in the field of academic publishing technology in the form of a mind map. It believes that the technological development of future discipline publishing will revolve around "people", such as doing things in my way (Let me do it MY way), let me simply get started (Make things easy for me), let AI work for me, I control my data (Give me control over my data), show me the credibility of research (Prove the research integrity to me), and let me trust you (Show me I can trust you), think of me as a digital native generation (Treat me as a digi-native).
More than ten years ago, we still celebrated the situation of ubiquitous information, but on the other hand, this may also be a disaster. We are in an era of severe information overload. The world publishes 6 million new songs and publishes 3 million documents every year, which is far beyond the limit of human listening and watching. In the professional field, there are more than 200,000 documents related to COVID-19 published in 2020 alone... These all remind humans to need better ways to assist in finding real needs, and we need more human search tools and more suitable analysis tools.
In this era of scarcity of attention, Luo Zhenyu, the founder of " gets ", once proposed a meaningful indicator "Gross domestic time" [4]. In the visible future, time is a resource with absolute rigid constraints. "Gross domestic time" is limited. No technology can increase your attention time, so he deduces that time will become the ultimate battlefield of business. One of the trends in the future changes in the Internet business model is to better help users save time. In the future, only technological products with more efficient communication methods and smarter access methods can win the hearts of users.
Looking at the international market, science and technology publishing giants are all planning and developing knowledge service products. For example, Thomson Reuters cooperates with text analysis and processing company Linguamatics to use natural language processing (NLP) technology to launch an integrated drug research and development intelligence platform Cortellis, providing accurate and operational solutions for drug discovery, clinical development, registration information submission and product commercialization; peer review platform ScholarOne cooperates with artificial intelligence company UNSILO to improve the editor's paper screening ability and save peer review time [5]. The reason is that these products can penetrate into the scenarios and provide users with personalized solutions, thereby more effectively helping users improve the efficiency of unit time utilization. For the Chinese science and technology journal community, if we can better sink products/services, explore users' real ideas, and constantly provide solutions instead of document resources through knowledge services rather than information services, so that users can easily find answers to increasingly complex questions and find the true meaning, we will achieve "Focus on the user"; what complements each other is that users will also pay higher rewards for this than traditional services. Market research has proved that knowledge services will produce better social and economic benefits than information services [6].
2. Pay attention to the promotion of the "open science" movement on the dissemination of science and technology
We have entered an era where sharing is fun. sharing economy has become an important value in modern society, but it must be clear that The core of the sharing economy is not sharing, but collaboration, collaboration in a large-scale way, and this scale is unimaginable to predecessors. The future trend of is not just sharing devices, but how to allow thousands or even hundreds of millions of people to interact in a cooperative manner, which will generate huge value and wealth and bring about disruptive social changes.
html At the end of the 120th century, the concept of open science was proposed in the international scientific community. Now, most international publishing giants believe that this is a more important driving force, and may even bring about systematic changes in academic exchanges. EU 's FOSTER defines open science as "scientific practices carried out in a way that others can collaborate and contribute, including research data, laboratory notes and other research processes, allowing free access, reuse, and re-research, and its basic data and methods can be redistributed and copied." [7] Open science is broader than open access, because the former focuses on the openness of the entire research, while the latter is limited to the acquisition of scientific research results publications. Scientific Community generally believes that this is the true face of science communication. The results and ideological crystallization they have worked hard should become global wealth, and should not become a profit tool for a few scientific and technological publications oligopoly . In 2016, STM made a new definition of open science. After that, the concept spread rapidly in the field of scientific and technological publishing, and more open publishing forms emerged, such as data publishing and video publishing.
Objectively, the global COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 has expanded the awareness of the concept of "open science" in the scientific community, strengthened the practical determination of the government, competent departments, scientific research institutions and scientific community. Such as "preprint platform" have become hot words in public opinion [8]. In the future, more scientific, technological and innovative models will revolve around open science and accelerate their development, and may even become the mainstream communication model in some fields [9-10].
When open science has become a major potential trend in the dissemination of scientific and technological achievements, we also need to pay attention to the protection and incentives of innovation, especially in the field of science and technology, we need to pay more attention to the issue of the initial public offering rights of innovation. is currently the popular technology that can be used to determine the first publication rights of scientists. It has the characteristics of decentralization, traceability, verifiable, and untamperable. If it is applied to the online publication of scientific and technological achievements, it can ensure the security of the first publication of scientific and technological achievements and academic trust, and prevent the occurrence of academic misconduct [11].
3. Artificial intelligence follows like a shadow, making it better. The science and technology journal
The author of "Out of Control" Kevin Kelly predicts the technological direction in the next 20 years: there must be a certain direction, just like gravity, where artificial intelligence is a technological trend that will bring fundamental changes to society, perhaps just like the previous printing technology [12].
As a landmark event in the era of artificial intelligence, AlphaGo overwhelmed the top chess player in 2019; in the field of vision, artificial intelligence has left human beings far behind. Science magazine predicted that by 2045, 50% of global jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, while the data in China will be 77% [13].Imagine that one day in the future, long-distance passenger drivers will be replaced by artificial intelligence driving, medical imaging practitioners will be replaced by artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence will replace most professional translators and write scientific and technological papers... Is this era full of challenging passion or the horror of unemployment?
Artificial intelligence will surely promote fundamental changes in the entire process of scientific and technological journals [5]. For example: researchers can use artificial intelligence to provide better scientific research design and submission guidance; in terms of writing and polishing papers, they can help scientific researchers organize, statistics and text revisions of data; for editors and reviewers, artificial intelligence can effectively assist in topic planning, select better and more topical articles from a large number of manuscripts; compare text and pictures through artificial intelligence, which can effectively avoid the occurrence of plagiarism; for non-English journals, artificial intelligence can help complete automatic translation without bilingual publication; for readers, services provided by artificial intelligence can achieve better personalized services, avoid spending a lot of time in querying and positioning literature, and quickly find solutions to professional problems.
As for whether future editors may be replaced by artificial intelligence, we don’t think there is too much panic; academic editors are not engaged in highly repetitive work. As a profession that is both innovative and service-oriented, the possibility of editors being replaced by artificial intelligence is relatively low. However, editing work also needs to be closely combined with artificial intelligence and human intelligence, and leave particularly repetitive work, such as typesetting, text proofreading, knowledge indexing, etc. to artificial intelligence for processing, and highly extract creative work and leave it to yourself.
4. Big data is the core resource of academic publishing and academic evaluation
Big data is increasingly having an increasingly important impact on global production, circulation, distribution, consumption activities, economic operation mechanisms, social lifestyles and national governance capabilities, due to its large capacity, many types, fast access speeds and high application value [14]. The 13th Five-Year Plan and the 14th Five-Year Plan continue to propose the implementation of the national big data strategy , comprehensively promote the development and application of big data in my country, accelerate the construction of a data power, promote the open sharing of data resources, release technological dividends, institutional dividends and innovation dividends, and promote economic transformation and upgrading. In the future, data will become means of production, and calculations will be productivity.
In the construction of the prevention and control system for the new coronavirus pneumonia in 2020, the application of big data has played a crucial role, and has made great achievements in our country's victory in this rare in a century-old battle to block infectious diseases. In the field of science and technology journals, the role of big data is becoming increasingly prominent, and the construction of core resources for future development must be based on the application of big data. Imagine that if all links of the scientific research ecosystem can be recorded without blind spots, it will produce unparalleled application scenarios; if it can be introduced into the peer review process of scientific journal papers, big data can help us explore the cutting-edge research of scientific researchers more quickly, better judge the value and credibility of scientific research work, help us implement more accurate user portraits for users, and provide more objective evaluation methods. From the perspective of readers, we provide a broad collaborative physical space with the help of the big data technology platform, obtain comprehensive information and knowledge display, understand the truth of the scientific research process more deeply, accurately judge the development laws of things, obtain better decision-making support, and accelerate the transformation and iteration of scientific research results.
It should be said that big data provides humans with a new way of thinking and new means to explore objective laws and transform nature and society. With sufficient computing power and efficient data analysis methods, it is possible to understand and discover the operating behavior, state and laws of real complex systems [15]. In the future, whoever masters the technology of big data application will be better able to discover the operating rules of science and technology journals and occupy the commanding heights of the development of science and technology journals.
5. Availability is the basic requirement of scientific and technological journals
In the past 30 years, one of the biggest changes in academic publishing has been digitalization [16]. We can no longer get rid of the impact of the wave of digitalization in the Internet environment. Some experts even believe that if the content of scientific and technological journals is not spread through the Internet, then the content can be considered to not exist. Researchers cannot do without computers, and now they cannot do without mobile devices. They need to access resources and information anytime, anywhere.
With the rapid development of technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, big data, smart wearable devices, similar trends will become more and more obvious. People will find that more and more screen display devices appear around, forming an ecosystem between different screens. Future science and technology journals may have the display effect of different screen display terminals, which are everywhere and at all times, and change according to the situation and according to the people. The high-quality academic content of science and technology journals will become a resource that technology companies compete for, and will be presented and consumed in ever-changing ways in application scenarios of various types of equipment and various businesses.
6. interaction is the original intention of scientific and technological journals to serve externally
The influence of interaction may be as far-reaching as AI. We have experienced interactive communication from paper plane placement to website plane output to social networks, and the interactive interface between humans and machines has begun to become close and humane. It is hard to imagine what computers will look like in the future, but judging from the evolution of mobile phones, they may become extensions of our body organs. You may achieve a lot of feedback and semantic expressions that cannot be achieved through words and keyboards through gestures, language, eyes, and expressions. This is also the original intention of science and technology journal services: to pass on valuable content to those in need, the faster the better, and the more real the better.
VR, AR, and MR technologies can achieve a mix of reality and virtuality [17]. Now we still need complex and heavy machines. In the future, these devices and machines will become more exquisite. Some may become "parts" of the human body. Through it, it receives external stimuli, recognizes human body feedback, and sends human body instructions to perform personal conscious operations, and completes learning and control of the target object.
Scientific and technological journals require a transformation process, from a static publication to a "living object" that can be seen, heard, touched and dialogue-based. It may transform into an interactive platform, a knowledge service tool, or an implantable device.
7. Fusion is the ultimate form of continuous evolution of science and technology journals
Economists have found that there are few new things, and most innovations are recombinations of existing things. Integration Innovation is to integrate various innovation elements through creative integration, so that each innovation element can complement each other. thus makes the overall function of the innovation system take a qualitative leap, forming a unique innovation ability and core competitiveness that cannot be copied and surpassed. For example, some of the ideas about technological innovation and service innovation in scientific and technological journals mentioned above, including changes in journal formats, changes in operating models, changes in communication media, etc. All these changes will be new products of scientific and technological innovation and development and the use of multiple measures. The premise of
fusion is deconstruction. First, it is necessary to do a disassembly, disassemble it into a very primitive state, and then reorganize it in another way, and then continue to carry out such a cycle. In fact, journals are the product of integration, but in the future we will face integration in a larger scope. Just as General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important speech on the development of media integration at the 4th meeting of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform in 2014, profoundly elaborated on the work concept, implementation path, goals and tasks of media integration.This has pointed out the direction for media people and science and technology publishers, followed the laws of communication of science and technology journals and the development laws of emerging media, strengthened Internet thinking, adhered to the complementary and integrated development of traditional media and emerging media, adhered to advanced technology as the support and content construction as the foundation, and promoted the deep integration of traditional media and emerging media in content, channels, platforms, operations, management, etc. [18].
8. Conclusion
As an important communication carrier supporting knowledge innovation and knowledge utilization, the development of scientific and technological journals is related to the prosperity and development of national scientific and cultural culture and the construction of soft power. Science and technology have promoted the development and transformation of scientific and technological journals many times in history, and will also bring new impetus to the rise of scientific and technological journals in the future. As the vanguard of the development of cutting-edge scientific and technological technologies, science and technology journals should prepare for the future, welcome the development dividends and huge boost brought to us by emerging technologies with a more open attitude, and create a new integrated publishing form with full enthusiasm to provide better services to readers and users. This is also the mission of our science and technology journalists to fulfill the Party and the country's "we must run first-class academic journals and various academic platforms well, and strengthen domestic and international academic exchanges" [1] and build a strong country in science and technology journals.
reference
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Note : This article is supported by the China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan for High-level Journal Talents Project-Youth Talent Support Project (2020ZZ110304), China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan cluster pilot unit (Excellence Plan-Cluster-5) Funding support
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