[Do journals need societies, and do societies need journals?] / Le società scientifiche hanno bisogno delle riviste e viceversa?

Starting in the mid-1600s, a number of scientific societies began to establish journals. The aim was to disseminate the knowledge developed by their fellows. The members of the societies were both the authors and reviewers of the articles as well as the main readers. Historically, there has been a tight link between journals, journal publications and a community of scholars working in specific fields of research who contribute to and manage them. In the second half of the 20th century, however, scientific societies began to consider the publication of their own journals primarily as a source of revenue, useful for the economic balance of the societies. The change was mainly due to the interest of libraries in acquiring periodicals to make available to readers. Gradually, the number of authors from outside the societies themselves increased and the link between members and the journals of the associations they belonged to decreased. Today, the national or regional connotations of many scientific societies make them unsuitable for managing a future of scholarly communication that should be open, diverse and fair, and operate on a global scale. As journal publishing has become a global undertaking and moreover, an undertaking that is increasingly mediated through online digital interactions, the author asks, do we need to rethink the structure of the learned societies that underpins them?

Self-help for learned journals: Scientific societies and the commerce of publishing in the 1950s.

In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased involvement of commercial publishers in the business of publishing research journals. Could learned society journals survive economically in the postwar world, against this competition? Or was the emergence of a sales-based commercial model of publishing - in contrast to the traditional model of subsidized journal publishing - an opportunity to transform the often-fragile finances of learned societies? But there was also an existential threat: if commercial firms could successfully publish scientific journals, were learned society publishers no longer needed? This paper investigates how British learned society publishers adjusted to the new economic realities of the postwar world, through an investigation of the activities organized by the Royal Society of London and the Nuffield Foundation, culminating in the 1963 report Self-Help for Learned Journals. It reveals the postwar decades as the time when scientific research became something to be commodified and sold to libraries, rather than circulated as part of a scholarly mission. It will be essential reading for all those campaigning to transition academic publishing - including learned society publishing - away from the sales-based model once again.

Making Public Ahead of Print: Meetings and Publications at The Royal Society, 1752-1892.

This essay examines the interplay between the meetings and publications of learned scientific societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when journals were an established but not yet dominant form of scholarly communication. The 'making public' of research at meetings, long before actual 'publication' in society periodicals, enabled a complex of more or less formal sites of communication and discussion ahead of print. Using two case studies from the Royal Society of London­Jan Ingen-Housz in 1782 and John Tyndall in 1857 to 1858­we reveal how different individuals navigated and exploited the power structures, social activities and seasonal rhythms of learned societies, all necessary precursors to gaining admission to the editorial processes of society journals, and trace the shifting significance of meetings in the increasingly competitive and diverse realm of Victorian scientific publishing. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these historical perspectives for current discussions of the 'ends' of the scientific journal.

JOURNALS, LEARNED SOCIETIES AND MONEY: PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, CA. 1750-1900.

This paper investigates the finances of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions, showing that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries journal publishing was a drain on funds rather than a source of income. Even without any expectation of profit, the costs of producing Transactions nevertheless had to be covered, and the way in which this was done reflected the changing financial situation of the Society. An examination of the Society's financial accounts and minute books reveals the tensions between the Society's desire to promote the widespread communication of natural knowledge, and the ever-increasing cost of doing so, particularly by the late nineteenth century.

Information revolution: William Chambers, the publishing pioneer.

With the arrival of steam power and new machinery in the 19th century, the production of printed media was transformed for the first time since the emergence of the printing press more than 300 years earlier. Yet until the 1850s, most publishers remained content with traditional methods, which enabled them to make profits from a small but affluent circle of readers. This article (part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series) will show how William Chambers (1800-1883) was one of the first to make full use of the new technologies. He was driven by a determination to reach readers of all social classes, to produce a genuinely cheap instructive publication and to overcome the challenges of reaching a national market from his base in Edinburgh.

Conscientious workmen or booksellers' hacks? The professional identities of science writers in the mid-nineteenth century.

Existing scholarship on the debates over expertise in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has demonstrated the importance of popular writings on the sciences to definitions of scientific authority. Yet while men of science might position themselves in opposition to the stereotype of the merely popular writer, the self-identity of the popular writer remained ambiguous. This essay examines the careers of William Charles Linnaeus Martin (1798-1864) and Thomas Milner (1808-ca. 1883) and places them in the context of others who made their living by writing works on the sciences for the general reader. Martin wrote on zoology and Milner moved between astronomy, geology, and geography. The essay unravels the close but ambivalent relationship between the professions of authorship and of science and highlights writing as another aspect of scientific practice. Both writers were moderately financially successful, but Martin's sense of failure and Milner's satisfaction reflect their contrasting images of their professional identity.