Biju Dharmapalan
bijudharmapalan@gmail.com
For a long time, scholarly journals have been the intellectual heart of academia. For over a hundred years, they have set the rules for how knowledge is made, judged, shared, and kept. Their familiar structure-the formal article with rigid headings, dense text, and a fixed layout-has survived mostly unchanged, even though the way we make and use information has changed a lot. But the speed of research today, the huge amount of data, and the high expectations of a generation that grew up with technology show that this old system is starting to break down. The scholarly journal as we know it was never meant to fit in with the way people learn in the 21st century, let alone the next.
The static nature of a traditional research article is increasingly out of step with how scientific research is evolving. Research is a process that evolves over time, but articles capture only a single moment in a much longer journey. The published paper stays the same when new data comes out or methods get better. Even small changes need new publications to fix or update it. This inflexibility contributes to a troubling culture in academia where many papers come from the same dataset, resulting in a considerable amount of unnecessary literature. This fragmentation does not make scholarship stronger; it makes it weaker, making it harder for researchers and readers to find the most critical insights.
A journal that will last into the next century needs to use a model that is more flexible and dynamic so that research can grow and change. Consider an article that persists post-publication. It gets bigger as new information comes out, changes as interpretations change, and keeps the whole study instead of just the first draft. This kind of versioned article would make it unnecessary to write multiple papers that are only a little different from each other based on the same study. Instead, they would show a clear, ongoing record of how science is getting better. It would be more honest and complete if every update could be recorded, looked over, and used as a source.
But the change has to be more than just changing the text. The journal of the future should fully accept multimedia as a way for scholars to talk to each other. Video demonstrations are often better at explaining complicated methods than long pieces of writing. Short documentaries can make fieldwork come to life, and interviews with authors in podcast format can help people understand the bigger picture and the effects of a study. Readers can better understand the results by using interactive graphs, animated data visualisations, and maps. These kinds of features don’t make scholarship less valuable; they make it more valuable by making knowledge easier to find and understand for more people.
To reimagine the journal, we also need to think about how peer review works. The traditional system, which is often hidden behind layers of anonymity, can be slow, unreliable, and limited by the views of a small group of gatekeepers. A more open model, where review histories are available and academic discussions continue after publication, could make research more collaborative and healthy. Community commentary and feedback from people in different fields would make published work more interesting to read. This would turn journals into places where people can keep talking about their work instead of just places where finished manuscripts can be delivered.
This new publishing ecosystem would also help fight the “publish or perish” culture that pushes researchers to write as many papers as they can, even if it means sacrificing originality or quality. Researchers can focus on depth over quantity when journals reward meaningful updates, rigorous data, and reproducible methods instead of volume. The literature becomes more cohesive, and the academic community gains from more clear and meaningful contributions.
The future journal should be more like a living knowledge platform than a static archive. It wouldn’t just store PDFs; it would also host changing documents, multimedia enhancements, interactive datasets, and open discussions. Students could learn better, policymakers could find clearer evidence, and researchers could talk to each other in more open and interesting ways. This kind of change takes work. It needs new technologies, new editorial policies, new ways to measure scholarly impact, and most importantly, a change in the way academics and institutions think. But the cost of not changing is much higher: a publishing system that becomes less and less connected to how modern research is really done.
The next century needs a journal model that is flexible, creative, open, and continuous. In the past, static, text-bound articles were enough, but they can’t handle the full weight of today’s research landscape. A journal that is truly ready for the future will use multimedia, allow content to evolve, promote genuine collaboration, and document the story of scientific inquiry as it unfolds. As knowledge grows faster and disciplines mix, the way we publish must change too. If journals can change, they will remain essential parts of scientific progress. If they can’t, they might become old-fashioned in a world that has moved on. Now is the time to think of the scholarly journal not as a museum of finished ideas, but as a living lab where knowledge is constantly changing.
(The author is the Dean -Academic Affairs, Garden City University, Bangalore).
Follow our WhatsApp channel
