I remember sitting at my parents' dining room table, holding my first personal issue of a scientific journal. The opening paper was the annual Presidential Address, a review article that slotted right into my first lab job, and my planned work in grad school. I reread the article many times, and that particular gentleman became a hero of mine because I learned so much. I met him eventually, a shy, quiet man, uncomfortable with any kind of adulation. I read every word in that issue, and in every other issue of the journal for years.
In grad school, I subscribed to more journals, but when it was time to move back home, there was a problem. Journals are printed on heavy, glossy paper, and each issue might weigh a kilo. I had the chance to put some of my belongings into the crate of a friend who was also moving back to Canada. I loaded two strong shopping bags with journals and lugged them onto the train to bring them to her. The German border guard was very suspicious. He paged through the issues for several minutes with their incomprehensible jargon and enigmatic scanning electron micrographs, and finally asked, "Is this some kind of pornography?"
Journals are magazines, most with perfect binding like paperback books. They get filed onto shelves, which sag from the weight. Individual issues droop into strange möbius-like shapes during their years of storage, so that it is impossible to open them flat. The famous magazine of scientific humour, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, published an article predicting that California would suffer massive mud slides and eventually slide into the ocean because of the accumulated weight of issues of National Geographic stored in peoples' basements. I blame my hernia of several years ago on helping a colleague move his National Geographic collection. Following this logic, surely the accumulating weight of scientific journals, which truly are never thrown away, must endanger the entire planet.
This love affair with scientific journals is difficult to break, especially for those who believe that a well stocked library equals wisdom. One of my colleagues subscribes to every journal in our field, only 20-30 of them, but he is a bachelor and doesn't need to negotiate for shelf space with anyone but his banker. In 2011, there were about 25,000 scientific journals. Web based journals have exploded since then, with many traditional journals switching to web-only publishing. Instead of receiving a paper brick every two months in the mail, we get a table of contents that might accidentally be routed into the spam folder by our over zealous email filters.
The truth is, I long ago stopped reading each issue of every journal I received. For awhile, I read all the abstracts, then only the abstracts of the papers in my narrow area. Then I just read my own papers to discover what horrible errors had slipped through the editorial process. Now, I hardly look at the tables of contents. Students no longer desire paper journals and are content to browse articles on-line. It is more convenient to download a PDF than walk into the lab and locate and pry an issue off the shelf. They can sample far more of the >25,000 journals on offer this way, but obviously something is missing. They don't read journals over lunch or before they go to bed. None will want to inherit my tons of journals when I retire, any more than I will want to move them. And despite the price I paid, most used book stores wouldn't touch them and the cost of postage would defeat any attempt to sell them on E-bay.
The journal as a representation of a broad, coherent field of study is disappearing, although most are still edited as if that mission holds true. The omnivorous curiosity of fledgling scientists cannot be satisfied by the prevailing psychology of web surfing. My own hoarding instinct remains intact, though, as I file PDFs on my computer, and carry them around on my iPad. It's still faster to relocate specific articles on-line than on the hard disk, but at least I have them in a tangible form that feels like a possession. And I will never, ever be able to push the DELETE button.
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