THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH COMMUNICATION

One of the looming questions for researchers is — how will we be communicating about our research by the end of the century? Forecasting is always a dangerous activity. The rule‐of‐thumb is either to cover a very short period (in which case you can hardly go wrong), or a very long period (in which case everybody will have forgotten the predictions long before their sell‐by date). A period extending into the early years of the next century seems to fall unhappily between these two preferred targets but it actually has one advantage, as I discovered some years ago. At the end of the 1970s I wrote a brief study of how information technology might affect the communication of research during the 1980s. One of the rationales for covering a decade was that typically it takes 5–10 years for a major new development to move from being a minority concern to engaging the interest of a large fraction of the relevant audience. (Television, for example, required some ten years to take off properly in both the USA and the UK.) So a ten‐year span should make it possible to spot some of the winners, though not necessarily how they will be used.