Self-help for learned journals: Scientific societies and the commerce of publishing in the 1950s (original) (raw)
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Firenze MCMXCVIII XXXII JOURNALS AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE Finito di stampare nel mese di novembre 1998 dalla TIBERGRAPH s.r.l. -Citta Á di Castello (PG) Finito di stampare nel mese di dicembre 1998 dalla TIBERGRAPH s.r.l. -Citta Á di Castello (PG) ISBN 88 222 4678 0 ISBN 88 222 4678 0
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Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science
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 the Transactions nevertheless had to be covered, and the way this was done reflected the changing financial situation of the Society. An examination of the Royal 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.
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Since the Second World War, academic publishing practices have had to cope with enormous changes in the scale of the research enterprise, in the culture and management of higher education, and in the ecosystem of scholarly publishers. The pace of change has been particularly rapid in the last twenty-five years, thanks to digital technologies. This has also been a time of growing divergence between the different roles of academic publishing: as a means of disseminating validated knowledge, as a form of symbolic capital for academic career progression, and as a profitable business enterprise. This briefing paper aims to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the future of academic publishing should look like. We argue that current policy regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communi...
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This study examines the role of learned societies as publishers in Finland based on bibliographic information from two Finnish databases. We studied the share of learned societies' peer-reviewed publication channels (serials with ISSNs and book publishers with distinct ISBN roots) and outputs (journal articles, conference articles, book articles, and monographs) in Finland. We also studied the share of learned societies' open access (OA) publications. In 2018, there were 402 peer-reviewed publication channels in Finland. In 2011-2017, the number of peer-reviewed publications from scholars working in Finnish universities and published in Finland was 17,724. Learned societies publish around 70% of these channels and publications, mostly in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Learned societies in Finland focus on journal publishing, whereas university presses and commercial publishers focus on book publishing. In 2016-2017, 38.4% of the learned societies' outputs were OA. This study concludes that Finnish learned societies play an integral part in national scholarly publishing. They play an especially important role in journal publishing, as commercial publishers produce only 2.6% of Finnish journals and book series, and only 1.4% of the journal articles from scholars working in Finnish universities.