Provocation: Journal experiments in overlay, data and provisionality

The Science Museum Group Journal (SMGJ) has always been, across its ten years, a refereed and open access online journal free to publish and read. Being online rather than on paper always conferred potential benefits that we were keen to promote: the ability to feature very high-definition photographs, to draw on the Museum’s extensive image library, to embed sound and film files, to link elsewhere on the internet. It follows that, for much research – whether our own, or that of partners, or indeed for all publications on congenial subjects produced beyond our own practice – SMGJ is a good place to publish. A clear example is the special issue we produced to communicate the early concerns of researchers on the AHRC-funded Congruence Engine project: the combination of the capacity to publish very quickly – only a year into the project – whilst serving the funder’s Open Access requirement was ideal. Another example is the Material Cultures of Energy project special issue. Thus, we can say that over its ten-year life the Journal has been successful within the parameters that it originally set itself (to be a peer reviewed, open access, online journal able to surface the scholarship, practice and collections that are relevant to science museums everywhere). However, looking to the next ten years, this provocation argues that the Journal should do more.