REVIEWS
"This clever and absorbing history charts the coming into being and imminent passing away of one of the most important forms of scientific activity - journal publication. Stocked with fascinating tales of scientific authors' deeds and sufferings, and of publishers' market savvy and ingenious trickery, Csiszar shows that the allegedly novel and dramatic alliance between scientific writing and commercial interest is nothing new, and in fact dominated the original developments of scientific literature and its vagaries in earlier centuries. The book explains how the notion of a quick and cheap technological fix for any apparent trouble of public knowledge first gained ground and why its mythology so evidently survives. The book will be indispensable for anyone interested in the roots of trust in scientific facts and their authors, and the central role played by print media in the crisis of intellectual authority."
— Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
“A scientific journal can make for dry reading; The Scientific Journal, on the other hand, does not. Csiszar provides a fascinating account about how this particular genre came to have its current form and, most importantly, its overwhelming status. There are thought-provoking challenges to our assumptions about scientific communication on just about every page.”
— Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University
"[F]ascinating and carefully researched . . . . This timely book challenges our notion of the traditional scientific journal by showing that it was the result of a long and complex historical process and much controversy."
— Times Higher Education
“Amid fresh convulsions in scholarly publishing, much here resonates — not least, how commercial interests have shaped science communication almost from the start.”
— Nature
"A timely reminder that the literary marketplace and political ideologies, together with science practitioners' own interests, shape the vehicles and multiple roles of science communication. . . . It is indispensable for graduates in the history of science and, especially, in library and information science. . . . Essential."
— CHOICE
"The book is full of detailed sketches of the fascinating personalities involved in the development of an institution -- journal publishing -- that we often think of as having always existed. Csiszar gives a compelling account of how the publication of scientific results in the fragmented form of journal articles won out as a format over comprehensive books. . . . This book will be a very welcome resource for students of the history of academic publishing, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of science as it tracks with the origins of the institution of the scientific journal."
— Publishing Research Quarterly
"This book is really the first one that focuses on the development and emergence of the scholarly journal as we know it today. . . . The author’s interpretations of the past in the introduction and conclusion are keen and help the reader better understand the twenty-first-century status quo of scholarly publishing. . . . In addition to those studying the history of science, this book will be of interest to scholars of library and information science, epistemology, the history of bibliography, and the history of the UK and France."
— Metascience
"Through a rigorous examination of the role of scientific institutions in framing knowledge, Csiszar has provided a compelling account of why the scientific journal took the shape that it did. His book is ambitious, in command of its material, and full of detail. More importantly, by showing how science came to be entangled with a particular medium of communication, it constitutes a timely reminder that the history of ideas cannot be separated from the forms in which those ideas were embodied."
— Victorian Studies
"Alex Csiszar’s brilliant new book on the scientific journal is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on science and nineteenth-century print culture. It deserves to be placed alongside the other important monographs appearing in the last two decades that examine the intersection of the history of publishing with the history of science. . . . An immensely satisfying read. . . . By concentrating on how the elite scientific societies responded to the proliferation of commercial science journals [Csiszar] is able to provide a new big picture upon which historians of science can build effectively in the future."
— Journal of Modern History
"Certain books are as valuable for what they reveal about our professional inheritance as for what they tell us about the history of science. This is one of those books. It is impossible to read The Scientific Journal without reflecting upon the mechanisms of academic publishing today."
— The British Journal for the History of Science
"With this work, undoubtedly destined to become a standard reference, Alex Csiszar marks an important milestone in a debate that will go on."
— Revue d’histoire des sciences (Translated from French)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: “Broken Pieces of Fact”
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0001
[expertise;historiography;peer review;popular science;public sphere;publishing history;Robert K. Merton;sociology of science]
Writing the history of the scientific journal presents several methodological problems. In part this is because the category includes a vast and varied collection of objects, but it is also because the invention of the journal is loaded with the baggage of narratives about its role in the rise of science in early modern Europe. Stories about the historical stability of the journal became widespread in the mid-twentieth century, when sociologists came to view the scientific literature as a privileged archive for studying scientific reward, consensus, and judgment. Later observers, however, rejected the image of science derived from this idea in favor of studying microsociological phenomena behind the printed page. Historians of publishing, meanwhile, challenged the inevitability of the distinction between expert and lay publics by focusing on genres beyond the specialized journal. This book takes a different approach by tracing how these boundaries developed historically: how did certain formats and genres became relegated to popularization and pedagogy, while one format became a key marker of the scientific expert? Understanding how so much epistemic weight came to be loaded into the journal requires understanding how the public legitimacy of science came to be so closely associated with the scientific literature.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1: The Press and Academic Judgment
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0002
[authorship;correspondence;judgment;learned societies;literary market;offprints;peer review;reprinting;scientific academies]
During the eighteenth century, academies and societies developed forms of life and of judgment that were set off from the universal criticism associated with learned journals. Despite the prominence of the Philosophical Transactions in historical narratives of modern science, the memoir collections associated with academies were a distinct and more prestigious form of publishing by the late eighteenth century, and the Transactions itself was eventually reshaped on this model. When publishers began to have measured success producing commercial periodicals focused on natural philosophy near century’s end, they hewed to prior models of journals and magazines: they often provided a locus for correspondence networks, and they digested, reprinted and translated content from elsewhere. But if the rise of a literary market was a source of ambivalence for the broader Republic of Letters, it was even more problematic as a model of natural philosophical judgment. Even while writing for periodicals became a means of making a career, scientific journals also became venues for printing (or reprinting) original research memoirs. As a potential alternative institutional locus for communal scientific activity, the periodical press presented a challenge to elite academies’ claims as the principal audience of scientific claims.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2: Meeting in Public
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0003
[François Arago;François-Vincent Raspail;July Monarchy;newspapers;peer review;political journalism;political representation;proceedings;public opinion;scientific journalism]
This chapter is about the politics of representation in science. During the 1820s and 1830s, scientific societies and academies began to publish journals of their own, modeled on commercial publications, with titles such as Proceedings, Comptes rendus, and Sitzungsberichte. To understand how and why this happened, this chapter focuses on the increasing publicity given to meetings of elite science during the 1820s. The rising political importance of newspaper reports on the meetings of government bodies set the stage for reporting on scientific meetings. “Public opinion” was invoked as the most legitimate judge in matters of science in opposition to the elite academies. The meetings of the Paris Academy of Sciences in particular attracted widespread coverage in political journals during the late Bourbon Restoration. Although the Academy increasingly accommodated such publicity, by the 1830s radical journals took a more aggressive approach to scientific journalism. This led to a confrontation between radicals such as François-Vincent Raspail and the Academy, pitting two distinct visions of the scientific public against one another. It is in this context that the Academy made the controversial decision to launch a weekly journal, the Comptes rendus hebdomadaires, which became a watershed in the history of scientific publishing.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3: The Author and the Referee
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0004
[anonymity;authorship;book reviewing;Britain;expertise;peer review;referee systems;Royal Society of London;scientific authorship;William Whewell]
In the late 1820s, British scientific practitioners joined political crusaders calling for the reform of institutions of governance. Among other things, scientific reformers wanted means of identifying true scientific practitioners in the hopes that delimiting a core of professionals would prompt the state to take greater interest in natural philosophy. This chapter follows the rising fortunes of two key identities in the emergence of the scientific expert: the author and the referee. In Britain, periodical authorship was an ambiguous professional identity, but the idea that certain kinds of specialized authorship could be a privileged marker of scientific activity was gaining ground. Concurrently, several learned societies were experimenting with new systems of judgment for their publications. The system initiated by the Royal Society of London was inspired by the Paris Academy of Sciences which used a system of public reports to judge manuscripts and inventions. But transporting this system across the Channel led to its transformation into a system based instead on the anonymous reports of individuals. The persona of the referee that emerged by mid-century was an amalgam of various identities including the legal expert, the trustworthy gentleman, the state bureaucrat, and the anonymous book reviewer.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4: Discovery, Publication, and Property
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0005
[astronomy;discovery;François Arago;history of science;intellectual property;invention;mathematics;open science;patents;priority disputes]
The priority dispute has long been a privileged site for historical and sociological studies of science. This chapter is a media history of these disputes. How might transformations in the formats and genres through which discovery claims became known to others have changed the nature and significance of such claims? What was the relationship between authorship of discoveries and authorship of texts? Insofar as publication mattered, what kinds of publications counted? During the 1840s, the idea that there was a necessary connection between scientific merit, priority, and print publication emerged as a topos that transformed the available discursive resources in such disputes. In France, the architect of the new journal of the Academy of Sciences, François Arago, deployed a series of historical case studies to show that print publication was crucial to the orderly resolution of priority conflicts. This campaign culminated in a vicious controversy with the Italian expatriate Guglielmo Libri that began with Galileo’s place in history. These questions formed the background for a bitter dispute between France and Britain concerning the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846. This was an occasion for articulating rival conceptions not only of property in ideas, but of the geopolitics of science.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5: What Is a Scientific Paper?
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0006
[Catalogue of Scientific Papers;demarcation;natural history;nomenclature;popular science;postal systems;priority;scientific catalogues;scientific metrics]
As savants began to view the publications of scientific societies and academies as a subset of a larger class of scientific journals, some began laboring to define the bounds of what was fast becoming a significant institution of elite science in its own right. Even as many specialized journals were founded, the venues in which new discoveries were rendered public remained remarkably diffuse. Faced with such diversity, some individuals launched catalogues designed in part to encompass the limits of legitimate discovery. Some of the earliest efforts in this direction occurred in fields of natural history but the most dramatic example was the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, a massive canonization project launched by the Royal Society of London in the late 1850s. Designed to include all original scientific papers that had been published during the nineteenth century, the Catalogue not only projected back in time a rigid definition of the scientific paper that required authorship, originality, and seriality, but by highlighting authorship it provided a means of appraising a life in science through an enumerated list of scientific papers.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6: Access Fantasies at the Fin de Siècle
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0007
[bibliography;citation;Franco-Prussion War;index cards;information overload;literature search;open science;peer review;scientific information]
This chapter explores the central role that the ascendancy of scientific journals played in French and British scientists’ reflections on the standing of their national research communities in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the rise of a powerful and unified Germany. In France, the most passionate reformers wished to democratize science by broadening access to information and by helping young savants to take full advantage of the complex system of journal publishing. In Britain, reformers called for rationalizing the “machinery of science” by standardizing the diverse array of practices by which scientific papers were accepted, distributed, and located by scientific researchers, editors, and societies. The rise of a powerful historical narrative about the central role played by scientific journals in hastening scientific progress arose precisely at a moment when the scientific literature was deemed to have entered a period of crisis. These controversies about the relationship between knowledge, print, and publics of knowledge helped consolidate views about the role of scientific journals in fostering the objectivity and cohesion of scientific communities that continue to be consequential today.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: Impact Stories
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553375.003.0008
[Impact Factor;open science;peer review;replication crisis;scientific metrics]
The litany of crises that science is now said to be facing —of replicability, of peer review, of misconduct—are often articulated in part as breakdowns in the apparatus of scientific publishing. But nearly as often these worries depend on a belief that the scientific literature ought to be—and once was—a trustworthy repository of carefully vetted scientific claims unsullied by politics and commerce. But the history of the scientific journal shows that the epistemic virtues that govern scientific life have never developed in isolation from the economic interests, technological visions, or political commitments of the individuals and groups that have shaped them. Both defenders of the heroic narrative of the scientific journal and those who now wish to throw the format aside as moribund must attend to the hybrid role that the journal has played as a site linking scientific, political, and market ecologies. As we experiment with new genres, formats, and platforms for bringing varied scientific publics together, we should remember that these media objects—and the values associated with them—have always been more fluid than they have sometimes appeared to be.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
