Thread by @psforscher

On the recommendation of @ivanflis, I’m reading “The Scientific Journal”, a history of how journals came to serve the roles of repositories disseminators, and guardians of scientific knowledge. I’ll be collecting interesting tidbits in this thread 🧵 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

Prior to the nineteenth century, “journals” were more like periodicals reporting news. Modern journals originated in the nineteenth century

Seventeenth Century journals had quite varied content, ranging from book reviews, to letter excerpts, to bits of journalism and gossip

Before the nineteenth century, the most legitimate/official medium of communication was the proceedings of learned societies, which gained legitimacy through associations with the local monarch. These societies viewed journals as disreputable & kept their distance from them

Eventually, societies faced enough competition from journals to establish their own. Some of the worries expressed by scientists over adopting this shorter format mirror contemporary concerns about access to data/stimuli

These new journals were perceived as being closer to “the public”. As the the monarch waned as a source of legitimacy in favor of the public, societies invested journals with the ability to judge the legitimacy of scientific claims

The 18th century French Academy did not have a learned journal. Instead it had a set of volumes called Histoire et memoires, which were large, lavish, infrequent.

Because they drew their legitimacy from the king, their actions also reflected on him

Many imitated this style of publication

Britain’s Royal Society did maintain a journal (the Philosophical Transactions), but they tried to keep their relationship with the Transactions at arm’s length so as to not tarnish the reputation of the Royal Society

The ambiguous relationship between the Royal Society and the Transactions drew criticism.

John Hill published an early hoax paper criticizing the Society & attacked what he perceived to be a lack of rigor at the Transactions

In response to Hill’s attacks, the society barred him from meetings and disavowed any connection to the Transactions

Privately, though, they realized that they didn’t actually know the Society’s role in the Transactions, and so did a review to find out.

The review found ... that the Society was involved in the Transactions. 😆

This spurred the Society to officially take over the journal

The official state societies thus got into the business of journals.

However, the academies faced increasing competition from commercial publishers, which increased their perceived legitimacy by reprinting society works & actively disdaining non expert readers

Slow society publications also faced pressure from authors themselves, who would circulate offprints and *pre*prints of their work.

What’s old is new