CEVAP Journal: the first Brazilian electronic scientific publication turns 20 years old

ABSTRACT

The printing-press revolution, one of the most important breakthroughs for humanity, began about 1465 when Johannes Gutenberg invented a moveable mechanical type for printing. In 1665, the first scientific journals appeared in France and England, called respectively the Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions. Since then, the structure of a scientific work has respected the basic paradigms "introduction, methods, results and discussion" ­ one of humanity's oldest formats. In 1900, 9,000 scientific articles were published per year; by 2000, this number had grown to 900,000. In 2010, PubMed Central, which does not index the majority of the world's journals, received 1,100,000 papers for indexing, i.e., approximately 3,000 per day [5]. These data demonstrate the exponential growth of the world scientific knowledge. The great challenge was how could this immense amount of knowledge be printed and delivered by mail? In August of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University (USA), founded the Los Alamos e-print archives (http//arxiv.org/), which was considered the first electronic scientific publication [6]. Its mission was to distribute papers automatically to cover the areas of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. It was an electronic system of automatic distribution with definitive submission or the possibility of a correction by the author. It was also discussed in the 1990s whether an electronic publication should be considered a scientific journal or not. According to the Vancouver Group, any electronic publication made available on the Internet constitutes a publication [7].(AU)