 Bloomberg Opinion -- One big change brought on by Covid-19 is that virtually all the scientific research being produced about it is free to read. Anyone can access the many preliminary findings that scholars are posting on preprint servers. Data are shared openly via a multitude of different channels. Scientific journals that normally keep their articles behind formidable paywalls have been making an exception for new research about the virus, as well as much if not all older work relevant to it.This response to a global pandemic is heartening and may well speed that pandemic to its end. But after that, what happens with scientific communication? Will everything go back behind the journal paywalls?Well, no. Open-access advocates in academia have been pushing for decades to make more of their work publicly available and paywall-free, and in recent years theyve been joined by the government agencies and large foundations that fund much scientific research. Covid-19 has accelerated this shift. Im pretty sure theres no going back. But the transition from a mostly closed system of scientific communication to a mostly open one will not be straightforward. Popular accounts often depict the move to open access as a simple toppling of a few for-profit publishers. As I have learned since writing such an account five years ago, the infrastructure around publishing, evaluating and repurposing scientific information has grown up over centuries and is not just going away.The scientific publishing industry has already proved to be, by the standards of the modern media world, impressively resilient. Its staying power is more than just a business story. The industrys structure shapes not just how science is communicated but how it is done, affecting the career incentives of scientists, the priorities of research universities and, to a certain extent, the course of scientific progress. To understand where scientific communication is headed, you must first understand how it got to be this way.How it all beganScientific journal publishing got its start in January 1665, when French lawyer Denis de Sallo began publishing the Journal des scavans an archaic version of savants, which consisted of book reviews, obituaries and legal reports, as well as scientific articles. Two months later Henry Oldenburg, a German theologian employed as secretary of the recently established Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, started, as a for-profit side gig, a monthly publication with somewhat more focus. His Philosophical Transactions had book reviews and obits too, but the main attraction was reports of scientific discoveries and research some from Royal Society members but most from Oldenburgs correspondents around Europe which Society members vetted before publication in an early form of peer review.Both journals are still being published, which tells you something about the resilience of the medium. As opposed to the books and less-formal means of scientific communication that preceded them, they performed four main functions this list paraphrases one by industry expert Michael Mabe that still apply today:Establishing who had an idea or performed an experiment first. Certifying quality, often through the mechanism of peer review. Recording the final, authorized versions of papers and archiving them. Disseminating papers to a targeted scholarly audience.By the late 1700s some scientists were already complaining that there were too many journals for anyone to keep up with. The solution turned out to be yet more journals, increasingly dedicated to single disciplines as science became more specialized. In the 19th century many of these emerged from the burgeoning ranks of non-profit scientific societies, such as the American Medical Association founded in 1847 and American Chemical Society founded in 1876, but for-profit publishers played a role, too.Early on they did so mainly in London. The Philosophical Magazine, founded in 1798 and now a journal of condensed-matter physics, became the first building block of the still-significant scientific publishing firm of Taylor Francis. The Lancet and Nature, founded in 1823 and 1869, respectively, became the worlds two most famous commercial scientific journals. All started out as eclectic publications aimed at practitioners and general readers as much as scientists, but now are known chiefly for their peer-reviewed scientific articles.It was in Germany, though, that the modern approach to commercial journal publishing took shape. As the country became the center of scientific research in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publishers such as Springer in Berlin and Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Academic Press in Leipzig produced journals for scientific societies and signed up promising young scholars to launch new, even more specialized publications. They left the article-writing and also the editorial decisions to outside scientists; the publishers job was to keep the editorial process moving and handle copy-editing, typesetting, printing, distribution and marketing.That tidy little business kept growing even through the hyperinflation and other ills that plagued Germany in the 1920s. Things did go backward with the Great Depression, the Nazi seizure of power and World War II, but after the war, big increases in research spending and university enrollments first in the U.S., then elsewhere in the developed world ushered in an entrepreneurial golden age for scientific publishing.The postwar golden ageThe Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft was under Communist control in East Germany and missed this boom, but former employees founded Academic Press and Interscience in New York, and a former intern built North-Holland Publishing in the Netherlands. Springer, meanwhile, got back on its feet with help from a Czech-born British Army officer who was detached to the press section of the British Embassy in Berlin after the war. The officer, who had taken the name Robert Maxwell, then started a joint venture with Springer in the U.K. that he later took control of, rechristened Pergamon Press and rapidly expanded. Maxwell wined and dined scientists around the world and launched International Journal of This after International Journal of That, before using the company to launch himself into a star-crossed career as full-fledged media mogul.The specialized journals these companies started often had circulations in the low thousands or even hundreds. So production costs per copy were quite high, even without paying the authors. Before World War II, many smaller society journals made ends meet by actually charging authors per-page fees to publish; by contrast, the commercial publishers launching new journals after the war were able to get by on subscription charges that university librarians, particularly in the U.S., were willing to pay. Library budgets were growing, professors who published in the journals insisted that their universities subscribe and favorable exchange rates kept the prices charged by European publishers within reason in dollar terms.The floating of the worlds major currencies in 1971, and the economic troubles that followed, brought complaints about high journal prices and kicked off a more complicated era for the business overall. New journals kept popping up, but the ranks of journal publishers began to consolidate. Leading that process was a relative newcomer to the field: Elsevier, a Dutch publisher best known in its home country for its encyclopedia, newspapers and eponymous weekly newsmagazine. Elsevier pronounced el-suh-veer began to dabble in scientific publishing in the 1930s, started its first English-language journal in 1947 and became a major force in the field after merging its scientific arm with North-Holland in 1970.Soon after that, it found the leader who would drive it to the top. Pierre Vinken was a neurosurgeon who became a part-time editor at the non-profit medical abstracts service Excerpta Medica in the 1950s, moved into a full-time executive role in the 1960s and then persuaded his colleagues to convert to for-profit status so they could sell out to Elsevier in 1971. He became head of Elseviers science division in 1972 and of the whole company in 1979, bringing a relentless focus on profit maximization and shareholder value a recent biography is titled in Dutch Against Idealism.Scientific journals were Elseviers most profitable business, so increasing their number became key. Elsevier picked up Pergamon and its 418 journals from a cash-strapped Maxwell in 1991, then went on to add the Lancet and Academic Press to its portfolio, among many others. It merged with British publisher Reed in 1992 and today is the chief profit center of the most profitable and valuable media company that hardly anybody has heard of: Relx Plc boasts a market capitalization more than six times that of Rupert Murdochs News Corp., three times that of ViacomCBS Inc. and 36 higher than Thomson Reuters Corp.In a report published last year, veteran industry analyst Claudio Aspesi estimated Elseviers share of the worldwide academic journal market at 17.5. Springer Nature, the product of a 2015 merger between Springer and a number of scientific publishing properties owned by its fellow German publisher Holtzbrinck including the aforementioned journal Nature, was No. 2 at around 13. No. 3 at about 9 was John Wiley and Sons Inc., the venerable New York area publisher of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, which expanded into scientific journals when it bought Interscience in 1961. Aspesi didnt calculate a market share for Taylor Francis, now a subsidiary of Informa Plc, but its generally seen as rounding out the industrys Big Four. Together, they control between 40 and 50 of the market. 