With more than 8,500 journals publishing content deemed worthy of inclusion in Science Citation Index Expanded, the launch of a new journal is not necessarily noteworthy. In fact, the proliferation of open access journals has become problematic, if in no other way than by filling email inboxes of scientists with invitations to join editorial boards of journals having little or no connection to their expertise. As an entomologist, I have been invited to submit to or serve on the boards of journals ranging in focus from electrochemistry to bone marrow research for reasons that are not readily apparent. There are journals, however, whose creation has had profound and lasting impacts on science and society; one such journal is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), first published on January 15, 1915, 104 years ago.
May R. Berenbaum.
By the time PNAS was launched, the National Academy of Sciences had existed as a scientific society for more than a half-century. The idea for a journal began to gain traction with the approach of the 1913 Academy semicentennial, an occasion for the membership to rethink the Academy’s role in American science. As George Ellery Hale, a brilliant and energetic astronomer elected to the NAS in 1902 at the age of 33, wrote in 1912, “The chief advantage of this celebration will not be accomplished unless it marks the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the Academy” (1). Hale was a forceful advocate for three specific ideas, writing letters and publishing articles to make his case: to enlarge the membership (particularly with “younger men”), to construct a building as a permanent home for the society, and to publish a new Academy Proceedings “for the first announcement of discoveries and of the more important contributions for research” (1).
The suggestions caught on and the Academy’s new epoch kicked off with the publication of the first issue of PNAS, described in its Front Matter as “the official organ of publication of the Academy” with the aim of furnishing “a comprehensive survey of the more important results of the scientific research of this country” in papers “much shorter…than those published in journals devoted to special branches of science.” As well, the journal set out “especially to secure promptness of publication, wide circulation of the results of American research among foreign investigators, and fuller recognition of the advances made in the separate sciences by persons more directly interested in other sciences” (2). The journal’s first issue reflected the Academy’s breadth, with 17 papers collectively encompassing mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, genetics, physiology and pathology, and anthropology within its 58 pages. Beyond scientific content, the journal also published Academy business—the Home Secretary’s report on the Autumn Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, the recommendation to present the 1915 Draper medal to Prof. Joel Stebbins, of the University of Illinois, and the names and affiliations of the Academy’s 141 members and 40 foreign associates.
In January 2019, as I begin my service as the 17th editor of PNAS, I am struck by how the journal has evolved in response to changes in the conduct of science, the nature of the publishing industry, and the priorities of society at large. The journal’s willingness to change is a major reason it has remained at or near the top of multidisciplinary journals for more than a century. That said, changes will be needed for PNAS to survive through its second century.
PNAS and the Evolution of the Scientific Enterprise
The most striking changes in the scientific enterprise may well be quantitative. In PNAS, for example, the 14 original subject areas have expanded to 31 and, with 214 Board members and 12 associate editors, its Editorial Board today is 18% larger than the entire Academy was in 1915. This growth reflects the fact that there are many more scientists today—NAS membership is now 2,822, a nearly 16-fold increase over the number in 1915—and considerably more data to be published. By one estimate, the amount of available genome sequence data alone doubles every 6 months and even more conservative estimates of doubling rates suggest that exabase-scale (1018) genomics is less than 10 years away (3). The scientific enterprise is also more collaborative than it has been in the past; from 1975 to 2016, the mean number of authors listed on papers rose from 1.9 to 5.67 per article (4) and there are even papers now with more than 1,000 authors. PNAS has grown commensurately; in 2017, PNAS handled more than 18,000 submissions and published over 3,200 articles in 25,200 pages, 13,800 of which were in print and 11,400 of which were online-only. Readership too has grown; in 2017, the PNAS website received 12.7 million hits, with 26 million PDF downloads.
The expansion of the size and coverage of PNAS reflects changes in scientific publishing as well as in the scientific enterprise.
This increase in collaborative science has created challenges involving author contributions, credit, and accountability. PNAS requires all authors to identify their specific contributions to the work and publishes this information in a footnote; however, concerns remain about whether the limited information provided is sufficient for allocating credit, specifying authors to contact for research material or additional information, explaining discipline-specific conventions for authorship, and hunting down and eliminating ghost or honorary authors. At the same time, the rise of multidisciplinary convergence research means that new approaches must be designed to evaluate integrated contributions of essentially equivalent value across multiple disciplines. Discussions are currently underway to evaluate available options to address these challenges and incentivize convergence and team science.
Successfully competing for a permanent position, federal grant, or, in general, a career in science depends on publishing timely research findings, but in many fields, outlets for publishing significant findings in a timeframe compatible with finding employment after completing a PhD program are few. Exacerbating this problem of late is the dramatic increase in the number of PhD scientists and the intensity of the competition, particularly among early-career scientists (5). Accordingly, PNAS is testing a new manuscript format—the Brief Report, designed for publishing results from single experiments with exceptionally important or potentially transformative findings without the full mechanistic details obtainable only after years of additional work. Brief Reports are limited to 2,000 words, receive expedited review handled by dedicated Editorial Board members, and are published open access with typically no more than 2 graphical elements (figures and/or tables). Although open to all authors, the hope is that early-career scientists may especially benefit from this opportunity to increase their odds of continuing on in successful careers.
PNAS and the Evolution of Scientific Publishing
The expansion of the size and coverage of PNAS reflects changes in scientific publishing as well as in the scientific enterprise. Print-based publication has steadily shifted to digital distribution for both current publications and archived material, with full-text indexing and increasingly sophisticated search algorithms. This shift has allowed PNAS to expand article page length and to archive datasets, images, and details of methodology missing by design when the journal was founded and as a result of the economic constraints of print publication. Today, PNAS is entirely digital; less encumbered by print constraints, features have been added to the Front Matter, including Opinions, News Features, Science and Culture articles, Inner Workings pieces, Core Concepts primers, and Journal Club blog entries, to broaden its appeal and relevance across the scientific community.
Digital publishing has paralleled increasing interest in expanded access to online content. Until recently, for-profit publishers have often restricted access with high prices for journal subscriptions and paywalls for individual articles. In response to calls for open access to research articles, for more than 15 years PNAS has provided a range of options for authors: immediate open access to readers in developing countries, online access to all readers within 6 months of publication, and immediate open access for a fee. Although free access to scientific knowledge is widely recognized as a public good, developing a sustainable financial model that does not overburden authors or funding agencies has been challenging. Although PNAS itself is self-sustaining, journal subscriptions provide a fundamental source of income for many other scientific societies, and it is unclear how lost revenues will affect their long-term survival. With major private foundations (including Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust) requiring immediate open access for all publications generated from research they support, PNAS has launched an experiment in which authors required by their funders to publish their work in open access venues are allowed to use the Creative Commons attribution license to publish in PNAS.
PNAS and the Evolution of Public Attitudes Toward Science
Hale and fellow founding editors of PNAS discouraged publication of narrowly focused papers so weighed down with jargon as to be unintelligible to most members and thus, in the Front Matter of the first issue, exhorted members “to include an introductory statement of the general aspects of the research and of its relation to previous knowledge in the same field, so that its significance be appreciated by those engaged in other branches” (2). Today, every article is accompanied by a 120-word Significance Statement to make the work and its context clear even to nonscientists. Effective communication with the public is a considerably higher priority than it has been in recent memory. As currently structured, the US scientific enterprise depends heavily on federal grant support and thus on public funding. Unfortunately, explaining the value of research findings to the public, historically never easy, has become substantially more difficult with the (often malicious) dissemination of biased or misleading information (6). Trolls, bots, and coordinated Internet campaigns interfere with direct and honest scientific communication with the public. Iyengar and Massey (6) recommend that scientific associations be proactive in developing online strategies for countering not just misperceptions but disinformation; this aspect of public communication will undoubtedly be a concern for PNAS for years to come.
A Look Forward
While PNAS is still a journal published by a scientific society, today it is published not so much for the members of the society as it is by the members of the society; this dimension distinguishes PNAS from most other high-profile multidisciplinary journals. In 2017, 1,192 members of the NAS served as editors for PNAS Direct Submissions and 1,043 nonmembers were invited by members to serve as guest editors. The diversity of NAS ensures the breadth of PNAS and ongoing efforts are aimed at increasing the scope of the journal, boosting underrepresented areas, accommodating new interstitial fields, and, as well, broadening member participation. At present, PNAS is unlike most society journals in having 2 tracks for submitting manuscripts: Direct Submissions, handled by member editors who solicit anonymous reviews, and Contributed submissions, open only to NAS members and handled by the PNAS office. For Contributed submissions, members may suggest reviewers, whose names are published with the manuscript. In 2017, 95% of the articles published were Direct Submissions, a percentage that continues to rise as members increasingly choose to submit their papers through this route to avoid any perceptions of privilege.
The availability of vast digital data and numerous sophisticated analytical algorithms has created a multitude of metrics for assessing the “value” of a journal. Each of these metrics has its critics but, for those who depend on them, they are available for inspection on the PNAS website (https://www.pnas.org/page/about/metrics). Most of these metrics place PNAS in the top tier of multidisciplinary journals. In 2017, PNAS had a Scopus Metrics CiteScore in the top 5%, an Eigenfactor in the top 6%, and a Journal Citation Reports impact factor in the top 8% of multidisciplinary journals. In my view, though, among the least ambiguous metrics is the Cited half-life value of the journal—a metric approximating the “shelf life” of published articles and calculated as the median age of a journal’s articles cited in a given year. For PNAS, the 2017 value exceeded 9.0, comparable to other top-echelon multidisciplinary journals and attesting to the durability and value of the research reported.
As for the future, just as organisms do not seem capable of evolving toward “perfection,” it is unlikely that PNAS will be able to change to address all challenges to everyone’s satisfaction. I look forward, however, to working with the journal’s dedicated Editorial Board and extraordinary staff to tackle the challenges in a manner consistent with the admirable goals laid out by the Academy a little more than a century ago. There is no other editorial board on which I would rather serve, irrespective of how intriguing the invitations in my email inbox might be.
Published under the PNAS license.
