History of a publishing colossus

In March 1665 Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the recently founded Royal Society of London, presented a sample issue of a periodical to the society’s council. As one of Oldenburg’s colleagues told the great Dutch natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens, the new journal was intended to publish “philosophical matters … from overseas” as well as reports of “any experiments, or at least the most important ones” in Great Britain. Today, the journal now known as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—often abbreviated as Phil. Trans.—is still in print. It is now one of many long-running journals published by the society.

Despite the Royal Society’s long-standing place in the landscape of scientific publishing, however, until last year there was no comprehensive history of its journals. Individual historians had focused on specific pieces of that story, analyzing episodes such as the foundation of the Phil. Trans. in the 17th century, the major financial and editorial changes it experienced in the 18th, and the 19th-century establishment of the society’s second journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

But it took a team of scholars, funded for multiple years by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, to produce A History of Scientific Journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665–2015. This impressive piece of historical scholarship not only makes a significant contribution to the history of scientific publishing but also illustrates the remarkable possibilities of historical collaboration and open-access publication.

A History of Scientific Journals is organized chronologically: Every era of Royal Society publishing is discussed in detail. Interested in why Philosophical Transactions split into series A and B in the late 19th century? Want to know more about the foundation and evolution of Notes and Records, the society’s history of science journal? Curious about how the society has handled the 21st-century transition to digital publishing? It’s all here, described in clear prose and carefully documented with well-chosen quotes from the society archives.

I am especially impressed by the work the authors have done to reconstruct the finances of the Royal Society’s journal-publishing operations. The team carefully traces how journal publication went from an expense that the society shouldered on behalf of its members to one of the society’s primary sources of income. Financial discussions among Royal Society members and leaders often led to debates about the value and purpose of journal publication. A seemingly mundane decision in the 1950s about whether the society should continue to pay Cambridge University Press to market their journals, for example, revealed that the society’s members were uneasy over the role of for-profit publishers in scientific publishing.

A History of Scientific Journals covers those debates in detail, giving us financial specifics, names and histories of Royal Society officers, and snippets from correspondence in the Royal Society archives. There are also flowcharts for editorial workloads, which illustrate how decisions about which articles to publish have at various times been made by editors, Royal Society fellows, external referees, or some combination of the three. That level of nuance and detail can, at times, make for slow reading. It is a delight for those, like myself, who are invested in the history of scientific periodicals, but those with only mild curiosity will likely find the book daunting. Even historians may find themselves focusing on some chapters while skimming or skipping others. But given that it is available open access, complaining that the book has too much detail would feel like complaining that a free buffet has too much food.

There are four credited authors on A History of Scientific Journals: Aileen Fyfe, a professor and historian of science at the University of St Andrews, and Noah Moxham, Julie McDougall-Waters, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik, who all worked on the project as postdoctoral fellows. Scientists, of course, are accustomed to publishing papers that include professors, postdocs, and graduate students as coauthors, but a multiauthored monograph is still unusual in history. Promotion and tenure for historians usually depend on single-authored scholarly books, and scholars in the field usually focus on projects they can execute alone or with the help of a few short-term research assistants.

A History of Scientific Journals makes a strong case for the value of more collaborative work. I do not think it would have been possible for a single historian, however dedicated, to produce such a detailed or wide-ranging study. It took multiple authors with different areas of expertise to bring this volume to life, and the book shows the possibilities of cooperative work in the humanities.

Finally, it’s worth noting that A History of Scientific Journals was published not only physically but also digitally, in a superb open-access version. I wrote this review using only that free digital copy, and it is the most user-friendly scholarly e-book in my collection. Many open-access e-books require readers to individually download each chapter, and most of the scholarly e-books I’ve paid actual money for don’t have hyperlinked footnotes or indexes, which means a lot of cumbersome navigating back and forth. A History of Scientific Journals, however, is available on the UCL Press website as a single, hyperlinked PDF, which makes it easy to navigate. I hope other academic publishers take note.

I recommend this book without hesitation to anyone interested in scientific publishing, in any era of history. It is an exciting scholarly achievement, available at no cost to readers.

Melinda Baldwin is the AIP Endowed Professor in History of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park. She is the author of Making “Nature”: The History of a Scientific Journal.