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Crises for Publishing Societies are Not New A History of Scientific Journals
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Crises for Publishing Societies are Not New A History of Scientific Journals
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Segment:0 .
SAM BURRELL: OK. So hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us again at Society Street. I'm really excited about today's session, because I've invited Aileen Fyfe to join us today. Some of you may have come across her work before. It was talked about at the last in-person Society Street event that we had back in 2019, which seems like a very long time ago now. She is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews, and she has just recently published a book on the history of scientific journals.
SAM BURRELL: Although, I have to say, having just mostly read through it, it's also a history about learned societies, and therefore, I thought was really interesting for this group. Would you like to start us off with telling us why you got here, how you ended up studying this, what drew you in?
AILEEN FYFE: Sure. Thanks, Sam. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to come and talk to a bunch of people who like learned societies, because I have found myself spending a lot of time recently studying learned societies. And I'm a historian of science and technology. So my training originally was in history and philosophy of science. And what really interested me from the start of my career has been the question of communication of scientific knowledge, particularly, communication between people in the sciences and also beyond.
AILEEN FYFE: So the early part of my career was actually focused on the history of popularization and science education. And through that, I became very interested in publishing not the only way of communication, obviously, but how things get published, who controls what gets published, how accessible is what gets published. And from that, I ended up running this project for the last nine years now on the history of the Royal Society's scientific publishing operations.
AILEEN FYFE: If you had asked me 15 years ago, I would have said I was never going to do that sort of thing. I was much more interested in popularization. But because -- there came an opportunity. It's an anniversary: 2015 was the 350th anniversary of the Philosophical Transactions, which is the world's oldest longest running scientific journal. And I happened to be around when there were discussions about "what should we do to celebrate this anniversary?"
AILEEN FYFE: We should do something. And I was one of the relatively small number of people around at the time who had an expertise in history of science and also in history of science publishing. My own core expertise at that point in time was very much 19th century, long 19th century. Whereas, we were now talking about a project that started in the late 17th century, and comes up of course, to the present.
AILEEN FYFE: So I got funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK to set up a team with some early modernists and myself, and some later modernists to do a full history of the Philosophical Transactions, because what we realized was that everybody knew when it started and who started it, which we will get to at some point. The origin story was known. But actually, we know so little about what happened next, and how on Earth we got from that origin moment in 1665 to later.
AILEEN FYFE: So in fact, the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries were going to be really important to their story. And so I ended up spending far more years than I had ever imagined in the first place working with a team of post-docs and with colleagues at the Royal Society in the archives of that society. They've got them. They're fantastic archives. It's really wonderful to have that sort of long run of archives.
AILEEN FYFE: Working there, trying to unpick how the journal was published, why the journal was published, when other journals started being published, how they were funded, who got to publish in them, who made the decisions, all that kind of stuff, and it ended up being really quite relevant to a lot of the debates that we're all discussing right now, whether as academics like me, or whether as society people like I guess, most people here today.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah, no, it's been really interesting. There's a lot in there that I didn't know at all. I loved a little bit about the birth story, because I'm sure there are going to be some people listening to this who don't know about the birth story. Originally, it wasn't necessarily of the Royal Society at all, was it? So tell us a little bit about where it was born and how it came to be.
AILEEN FYFE: So the origin story, which is relatively well known, goes that in early 1665 rather impoverished German emigre in London by the name of Henry Oldenburg, had this idea to set up a news sheet, a periodical about the goings on, the transactions, in the world of natural philosophy. There's a bit of national rivalry going on between Paris and London, because the Journal des Scavans was set up in Paris just six weeks before the Philosophical Transactions started in London.
AILEEN FYFE: So the claim for the English speaking world and for Oldenburg is that his periodical was focused on the world of natural philosophy and science, whereas, the Journal des Scavans was broader, its remit. And they knew about each other. And they were in correspondence with each other. So not quite rivals in any bad sense. Anyway, so Oldenburg had this idea, we need to understand a little bit context.
AILEEN FYFE: He's in need of money. So Oldenburg was trying to find a way to increase his income. He himself was closely associated with this group of gentlemen scholars who were interested in the sciences, a group that were known as the Royal Society. They'd only set up in 1660, five years before the moment we're at. And they're quite important in the history of science for developing a new approach to the sciences and for being very keen on the idea of experimentation.
AILEEN FYFE: And Oldenburg was their secretary, so he knew there were quite a lot of people in London who were interested in the sciences. He also had an amazing correspondence network across Europe, because he himself was from the German lands. He knew people in Paris. He knew people in all sorts of places. And his idea was to create a periodical that he could sell to people like the fellows at the society that would tell them what was going on all across Europe.
AILEEN FYFE: So he was almost more like a newspaper editor in many ways rather than a scientific journal editor. He was gathering copy from throughout his networks through the stuff that's coming into the Royal Society, but also things that were being published, things that were coming in in his correspondence from Paris, or Breman, or Turin, or whatever it happened to be, and he was curating that, translating it, excerpting it, summarizing it, and filling the pages of this new periodical for the benefit of people like his friends in the Royal Society.
AILEEN FYFE: So it's quite a different kind of thing from what we might imagine as a society journal.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah, it didn't actually come from the Royal Society. It wasn't sort of their collective brainchild, was it? It was the brainchild of this one individual. Without going through all of it, because there's a lot of how it migrates and changes over time, as it changes leadership, I suppose, rather than necessarily-- I guess it is editorship, isn't it, from the beginning-- there's an astonishing lack of clarity about who owns it, because it seems like at the beginning he did make some money out of it, right?
SAM BURRELL: That was my impression, perhaps not as much as he'd hoped, but it did feed him. You can skip forward a little while later, and it seems like that's no longer the case. It seems like it's been the Royal Society has seen that it has a benefit to them to be associated with this publication that they are using their fellows to effectively run it in some kind of slightly tense fashion between the fellowship and what's happening in the publication.
SAM BURRELL: But if you can skip forward a bit, and not that far ahead, it's no longer generating a positive contribution to anybody. In fact, there was one guy-- I can't remember his name-- his name begins with S -- he was bankrolling it, wasn't he? Tell us about him.
AILEEN FYFE: Yeah, so you're thinking about Hans Sloane.
SAM BURRELL: That's the one.
AILEEN FYFE: Who is perhaps better known as one of the founders of the British Museum after his death. He was a doctor and a botanist, made some of his money in the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. He had a big correspondence network too, and he also had a lot of money. And we'd know for sure that he was putting his own money into keeping the Transactions going when he became Secretary of the Royal Society and took over the running of this periodical.
AILEEN FYFE: The Transactions, it's actually amazing in retrospect that it survived the death of Henry Oldenburg, because he died just 12 years after setting up the Transactions. And it would have been so easy for The Transactions to die. But a series of different people did take it over and kept it going. Enough people thought it was useful and a good thing to have.
AILEEN FYFE: They managed to keep it going. And we don't know for sure about its finances in that in-between period, but we strongly suspect that these other people even before Sloane were putting their own money into keeping going. They certainly weren't making money out of it. They were all wealthy gentlemen. Sloane was particularly wealthy, but he wasn't the first we suspect to be bankrolling it.
SAM BURRELL: So that's an interesting point about the value of it. So clearly, a group, whether it was a formal Royal Society view, or whether it was just a number of the fellows of the Royal Society saw that it had value, could you articulate what some of that was do you think? What was it that they thought that this publication brought?
AILEEN FYFE: They had different opinions. I mean, if you look over the first 40 or 50 years of The Transactions, every time there's a new editorial team in charge-- sometimes, it's individuals, occasionally, it's pairs of people-- it changes what it is. Is it a way to publish goings on from across Europe for an English speaking readership? That's what Oldenburg was originally doing. Not all editors after him had the connections or the language skills that he had.
AILEEN FYFE: Was it instead perhaps, a way to publish the best stuff that the Royal Society members themselves were doing? That's what some of the editors tried to make it about. Or is it a way to publish interesting communications that are sent by friends of the Royal Society, but is distinct from the experiments that also The Royal Society itself does, because that gets published in books or pamphlets elsewhere. So there's a number of different models for it.
AILEEN FYFE: All of these things are kind of useful and interesting, because we're living in a world way before the internet, way before cheap, available print. Communications are slow. They're accessible only to the well-educated and relatively affluent. And so finding out what's going on, whether it is what's going on in the Royal Society, or whether it is what's going on in Paris, or Berlin, and Uppsala, any of those things are worth finding out about.
AILEEN FYFE: And also, I would say that the fellows of the Royal Society, this is the late 17th, early 18th century now, were starting to realize that although the Royal Society didn't officially own or run the Transactions at this point in time, people across Europe thought they did. People across Britain thought they did. And it was getting their particular Royal Society quite good reputation.
AILEEN FYFE: It was getting them known. But it meant that this little group of gentlemen who started off meeting every Thursday evening in London were actually known about across Europe. And that was no bad thing. And so there was also that prestige value. And initially, it's a service to the fellows of the Royal Society as readers of periodical. But by the time we're 30 or 40 years later, they're realizing that actually it's good for the organization, for its reputation.
SAM BURRELL: So I might be skipping ahead in time, but there's also the other thing that really caught my attention was the gifting and the distribution of Transactions. And I think this is a bit later when the editorial policy becomes, it must be something original. And the print production was extremely high value with lots of illustrations, and you know, a nice physical object that was quite in depth, I suppose, and was then distributed really widely for free, right?
AILEEN FYFE: So you're talking about the period after 1752. And 1752 is the moment when the Royal Society decided that they would actually take ownership of this periodical. It's been existence for over 80 years by this point in time. The majority of people think the Royal Society run it anyway, because its editor is always a fellow of the Society, and many of the people associated with it are fellows of the Society. But that was the pivotal moment. And it's got a number of consequences, one of which is this question about gifting, because the Society has made a decision to formally take on ownership.
AILEEN FYFE: That means editorial control, which is one of the things they particularly wanted, because there were some critiques of the most recent past editor, and how good a job he was doing, and whether it was bad for reputation. It also means financial control. And the consequence of that, one, is the Society has to pay for it. But because the Society is paying for it, they then own the copies.
AILEEN FYFE: And once you own the copies, you start thinking about what you could do with some of those. You could, for instance, give free copies to all your members, but you could also give copies to people you want to impress, like, the King. You could send copies to other scholars who are in Europe, or other cognate organizations that are in Europe. So they start send copies to Oxford and Cambridge University, to the Academy of Royale des Sciences in Paris, to the Royal Academy in Stockholm.
AILEEN FYFE: By the time we get to the end of the 18th century, there's several dozen of these free copies going out. Whether they're exchanges or not is a kind of an interesting question, because some of them, like University of Oxford and Cambridge, or later of Harvard, or anywhere else, they're not sending anything back. Those ones are gifts. But some of the other societies do reciprocate.
AILEEN FYFE: I just mentioned Paris Academy Royal. So they've been publishing since 1699, so after the Royal Society. They had a different publishing model, because they started off as an institutional publishing model. And because they're funded by the Crown in France, theirs is funded by the Crown, and given away as gifts. It's a very different kind of model from the way that the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions started off.
AILEEN FYFE: But by the time the Royal Society takes over the Transaction in 1752, they're doing something a bit like the Parisians were doing, except they don't have the funding from the Crown. So they're doing it on the basis of other income streams. But that complete transformation from this very newspaperish kind of periodical that's bringing news in for the fellows to read and is sold, that was it under Oldenburg.
AILEEN FYFE: And now in the late 18th century, we've got something that's mostly presenting the work of the fellows in London, and their friends, and colleagues, and is sending it out. And so the sending it out is becoming much more important not necessarily for money. That's not necessary.
SAM BURRELL: No, it's about building prestige, isn't it?
AILEEN FYFE: It is for the prestige of the authors themselves and the society as an organization that has such a clever bunch of chaps -- they are all men at this point-- associated with it.
SAM BURRELL: So then skipping forwards a bit, that becomes a problem, doesn't it, that they're sending out all these lovely, expensive copies of Transactions all over the world? Because prices have gone up, and suddenly, you've got a situation-- suddenly, she says-- [LAUGHING] some years go by. But because it was such an expensive publication, and they were giving it to their members, and sending it out widely, that became challenging, and they needed to make some changes.
SAM BURRELL: Do you want to talk us through what happened there?
AILEEN FYFE: Yeah, it's partly all the free copies, yes. And I'll just give you a sense of that. In the early 19th century, the print run was about 1,000 copies. And of those, about 750 of them were earmarked for the fellows. Not to say they actually took them, but in theory, 750 of them were already earmarked for free copies for fellows. And of the rest, there's another about-- I should've checked my numbers-- let's see, it's about another 100 or so that are earmarked for gifts and exchanges.
AILEEN FYFE: Think about the number that's left at this point. That's the number, about 150 that could in theory be sold. And actually, we know from the number that were left in the warehouse that most of them weren't. The sales were tiny. There were some, but there were maybe 80, 90, maybe 100 copies being sold. Most of the rest has been given away, perhaps, to fellows, so it's a membership card, but also to the universities, the other national academies, et cetera.
AILEEN FYFE: Now, that's OK if you've got a big enough society of wealthy people who can pay membership fees that will support all of this. And it's OK if you're not publishing too much. But over the course of the 19th century, the scientific community in Britain and the British world grows, so we have more people who are interested in sending their work to the Royal Society for publication.
AILEEN FYFE: And also, the Royal Society editorial committee is not very bothered by what we now call page limits, or word counts. They really are just not bothered at all. And so they're very willing to go for argument and say, well, these illustrations are absolutely essential to convey my argument. And yes, of course, I need 40 pages in order to convey it. The papers are getting longer.
AILEEN FYFE: They're very well illustrated, and they're still quite high production quality. So we've got more papers, longer papers, more expensive papers. And it's at that point that you start to realize that trying to sustain that with so few paid for sales is getting difficult from the Society's own resources. By the 1890's is when we get to crunch point. There were a couple of very expensive years in the early 1890's thanks to a couple of very, very illustrated papers.
AILEEN FYFE: And it really got the Society's treasurer really, really worried, because they're using up a lot of the Society's income on publishing the journal, which isn't necessarily a problem by the way, because the Royal Society at this point in time doesn't spend its money on much else. It doesn't have a conferences program. It doesn't have a grants program yet. But mostly, what it does is have its weekly meetings and publish its journal.
AILEEN FYFE: It's happy to devote much of its funds to publishing its journal, but the journal is just getting so expensive that we can't do it anymore, and this is becoming a serious problem. And the solution is quite interesting. In 1895, the secretary of the Royal Society wrote to the UK government saying, could we have government support, not just us personally as Royal Society, but us on behalf of all the learned societies who are all having the same trouble because of the growth of the scientific enterprise at this point in time.
AILEEN FYFE: And the government says yes. And so the government starts to provide an annual grant that can be used by the Royal Society and others to support their publishing. I have to say, it's not a huge grant. Up for the next 25, next 30 years.
SAM BURRELL: It's remarkably similar to where it feels like we are right now in some ways with publishing, in the sense that there's a real tension between not just learned societies, but learned societies and publishers of journals needing to publish -- or there being a requirement, or an appetite for much publishing to occur, and attention with who should or could pay for it.
AILEEN FYFE: So that over the next few decades once we come into the early 20th century, the problem about the amount of material being published and how much there is, within numbers of papers, and in the length and expense of publishing those papers, this problem just keeps getting worse throughout the 20th century, and obviously, in the 21st century as well. There's no technological solution to it. Digital printing is a century away yet.
AILEEN FYFE: We're still talking about print on paper. We're still talking about hot metal typesetting, and the very expensive typesetting that's necessary for technical stuff. It's just getting more and more expensive. And it's the question of who should pay? Well, especially when you've got the Royal Society, and you've also got-- let's see, we've got the Astronomical Society, and the Geological Society, and the Chemical Society, and why should the Royal Society pay for these ones, but the Chemical Society should pay for those ones?
AILEEN FYFE: How do you decide who should do that? Should the government pay? Well, the government has from the middle of the 19th century been funding some scientific research. And so the argument in the 1890's was that because the government is already funding some scientific research, it's important to fund also the publication and dissemination of that research, otherwise, what was the point?
AILEEN FYFE: And the government accepted that argument in the 1890's. But it just keeps growing. So by the time we're in the 1920's, which is a difficult time economically for everybody in Europe for all sorts of reasons, and labor costs have gone through the roof, and we're looking at crisis again, and at that point we get the fascinating solution of industrial sponsorship, where the firm that becomes Imperial Chemical Industries, ICI, they give the Royal Society money, as well as the government money to help fund this.
AILEEN FYFE: But it's really just as well about this point in time we start getting new customers for the journal so that through their first half of the 20th century, it's a-- I'm trying to think what the technical term nowadays would be-- there's a mixed income stream. We're not just relying on sales. We have some sales income, more, than we had. And that's thanks to North American universities, relatively new universities who aren't already on the gift scheme.
AILEEN FYFE: Harvard's been on the gift scheme, but some of the new land grant universities that are emerging in the late 19th, early 20th century, they become customers. They buy the journals. That's very useful for lots of British learning societies. We've also got the industrial sponsorship. We've also got the government sponsorship, and we've also got the Royal Society's own funds, which thankfully, have been augmented by a number of major donations in the very early 20th century.
AILEEN FYFE: So they're paying it from their endowment and also from their annual running costs. All of that together keeps the journals going for a bit longer until we get to our next crisis point in the 1950's.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah, it's really interesting that actually, I think today, there's a number of societies who are having a crisis about how they're going to keep afloat because their revenues are being challenged on many fronts, that open access looks like it's going to be reducing their subscription income massively. Revenue from meetings has gone down massively. And there's a lot of anxiety around the kind of ability to survive this.
SAM BURRELL: What's really noticeable about the story in your book is that this is a repeating pattern.
AILEEN FYFE: Yeah, and especially I think over the last 150 or so years, I mean, we're looking at a lot of change over that period. We've had the professionalization of academia. We're no longer talking about wealthy gentleman scholars who are the only people who could afford the time and the education to do science. We're now talking about a world where there's a lot of different people involved in research who don't have independent wealth, but are surviving on university salaries of more or less, generosity.
AILEEN FYFE: We've also got a world where publishing has changed in various ways. We've got a world where the role of learned society is maybe not as certain, or as clear as it was once. We've got different skills of operating. Are we now just have working within Britain, or are we working for a global audience? And which incidentally is another of the problems about the print on paper world and the cost, because if you are aiming to send your London print on paper journals not just to places in Europe, but to places all over the world, then that costs even more.
AILEEN FYFE: And that's what they were hoping to do in the 20th century, and they basically had to give up doing. Yeah, we just get these constant crises, but also reinventions. I mean, that is the striking thing about the 1890's through 1920's through 1950's story is these repeated moments when we think publishing journals are just far too expensive, we cannot do it. And everybody keeps saying, oh, there might be a technological revolution, and it doesn't happen at that point.
AILEEN FYFE: And so they have to find new ways of finding money. And in the early 20th century, it's about a multiplicity of funding sources. And we've kind of forgotten about that, I think, because in the 1950's what happened was a transition to a commercial sales based model. And at that point in time, with the other funding sources kind of dropped away, and we all started thinking that selling the journals was clearly the way to go, which worked very well in the 1950's, '60s, and early '70s.
AILEEN FYFE: But everyone who knows anything about a serious crisis is aware that it's not actually been working quite as nicely since the 1980's probably. But this idea that journals should survive on the basis of subscriptions income, or subscription income plus a few royalties, plus some JStore income, that's quite a recent phenomenon. It's not how journals were supported in the long term. So I guess we're going to have to think up more creative ways of finding income streams.
SAM BURRELL: So I'm going to ask you a slightly more esoteric question, I suppose. It seems to me like learned societies have done an extremely good job of surviving, and changing, and adapting through changing times. What do you think their value proposition is now, and how closely tied do you think that is to their journals' activity?
SAM BURRELL: That's really hard. Sorry, I didn't prep you for that question.
AILEEN FYFE: It's interesting, isn't it? Because I mean, one answer I can give is the story from the 1950's, early 1960's, which is a time when Pergamon Press, and Robert Maxwell, and also for that matter, Springer, though they're not quite publishing in English yet, but they're about to, Elsevier, who are publishing in English, they're in other words, commercial publishers who don't have learned societies, learned communities behind them.
AILEEN FYFE: They're getting into journal publishing, and there's a lot of angst going on in the journal, the learned journal community in the 1950's and early '60s about, A, can we survive at all, because we're having a financial crisis? B, can we survive because there's these new commercial players coming in? And what is our purpose? And one of the answers to the what is the purpose of the learned society from the point of view of new journal publishing, and from that point in time is that the learned society is the community of scholars who share the scientific interests of the authors and readers of the journal, whereas-- I'm paraphrasing rather than quoting-- but whereas, commercial interests can't be trusted, because when commercial interests are at stake, the needs of science might be forgotten is the concern they have from that point in time.
AILEEN FYFE: They have no evidence incidentally, that this will be true. It's what they fear will be true at that point in time, so that idea that a society of academics, academic researchers will better represent the needs and interests of readers and authors. The other possible argument is a kind of governance and ownership one, that that's also put forward in the early 1960's.
AILEEN FYFE: But as a learned society keeps going, occasionally, learned societies get wound up, but not all that common. And so whereas, a commercial publisher can go bust, or can be sold, or merged, or acquired, and so the journal might disappear, whereas, a learned society should be able to keep a journal going, because learned societies, they reckon, and from 1960 don't die.
AILEEN FYFE: So those points are still broadly valid I think to this day that the nonprofit and research oriented nature of a learned society, or subject association, or something like that has got different interests at heart than a commercial stakeholder, profit-driven organization, and probably won't go bust, or get acquired, or merged either. So that's positive. But we've also got a big change in the relationship I think, between the journal and the society now that academic communities have got so much bigger, bigger in terms of numbers, but also bigger geographically.
AILEEN FYFE: And when the Royal Society and its journal started off, there were a bunch of about 50 gentlemen who got together every Thursday evening and met up. They knew each other. They had a lot of interests in common, and they had they had a periodical that's still read. Even in the 19th century, we've still got a relatively small-- it's about 700 people at that point in time-- not all in London, but many of them coming to London at least a few times a year, and journalists publishing things that they're writing, or their friends and colleagues are writing, and they're reading it.
AILEEN FYFE: So at that point, the society's fellows are the readers and the authors, plus, their friends and relations. Fast forward to the late 20th century and we've got a world in which is a society journal mostly read by society members? Well, not only. Is it mostly written in by society members? Well, not only.
AILEEN FYFE: Is it edited and peer reviewed by society members? Which was true for the Royal Society until well into the 20th century, but that's not true anymore either. So what is the special link between the society and the journal now? And I'm not quite sure what the answer to that one is, but it's definitely different. And so I still think that communities of scholars are the right sort of organizations to run journals.
AILEEN FYFE: But if a society's trend is actually in its meetings, and its events, and its for members, and its community nature, that is I think limited by scale. It works best in a regional or national setting where you can all get together. But that's not the right scale I think, for publishing, so there is a tension there.
SAM BURRELL: I think that's a really good point. And I picked out a quote about one of the reasons for publishing a journal is around creating the community, and it's again, going back a while. And I thought that's a really interesting thing, because from where I sit working with societies now, and some of the challenges that that's facing them, one of the things we talk about a lot is the nature of the thing that many people value about society membership is being part of a community.
SAM BURRELL: I was speaking to a board of a relatively small but international society who were talking about what they really liked about their meeting. And this chap said, he said, it's like being somebody who has a special interest in model railways, and you get to go and meet this group of people, and you can geek out and talk to your heart's delight about whatever it is that really floats your boat.
SAM BURRELL: And because the nature of research in particular, you end up being very niche very quickly, it's really nice to be able to find your people where you can talk about your area of expertise, and other people can engage with it. And there's kind of a opportunity to collaborate, and spark ideas with each other, and there's a very human getting together to explore an idea. And because of the nature of the research enterprise, and the fact that everybody does end up specialized so quickly, there's something very valuable about that.
SAM BURRELL: That's not the same as a journal anymore at all. And I wonder if that's because there's so many other ways of us communicating with each other in that you go right back to that birth story of Transactions. And I mean, what really struck me about what the book says about what was in those first copies of Transactions is that it sounded you know, it wasn't clear who the author was.
SAM BURRELL: It was a bunch of random information that Oldenburg thought that the people would be interested in. And it was much more community building. It was a gossip sheet for scientists, right?
AILEEN FYFE: Yeah. And it is interesting when you think about that, how the role of community building has shifted, because I would say for much of the 18th and the 19th century certainly, the publications were a really important way of building a community beyond the number of people who can get together in a room in London every week, because that's even by the 19th century, it's still a British organization, but they can all make it to London every single Thursday.
AILEEN FYFE: And the journal gives you a way to keep up with what's going on, to hear about what you would have heard had you really been in that meeting. So it extends the community. And there are other journals of course, that create communities that start off in journals then become a society later on. There are examples of that. But the rise of what we now recognize as scientific conferences, that's a phenomenon of all getting together to hear papers, that's a later 19th and especially 20th century development.
AILEEN FYFE: And it really takes off of course, once you get affordable jet air travel, and you get that sort of international travel. But that gives you a new way of communicating at an earlier stage in the research process, because with the journals that we're talking about at the moment, the Royal Society journals that's the very finished, polished, well thought out, written up, fully justified and explained version of research.
AILEEN FYFE: And I think there's already concerns, one that I can think of is actually from the 1930's when the president of the Royal Society says, why do we publish? And one of the reasons he's asking that question is, who's reading this stuff? He's worried that, yes, there are these wonderfully full and worked out and detailed papers, but who's reading them?
AILEEN FYFE: And if most people only read in their own field and they don't have much time anyway to read, who's reading? Whereas, this is exactly the same period when people are going to conferences and are enjoying those conversations about work that's perhaps more in progress than finished version. And so now, we've got conferences. We've got workshops. We've got online conferences.
AILEEN FYFE: We've got all sorts of different ways of communicating. So it's not surprising that the role of both the society and the journal has changed in all of that.
SAM BURRELL: I mean, there's a couple of things that makes me think of. One of them was when they first-- forgive me, I can't remember which century we're in now. But at some point, somebody decided that the Royal Society meetings should just be an hour, and there shouldn't be any discussion, and it would just be the reading of a paper. And actually, the author wasn't allowed to read the paper. It had to be one of the secretaries who read the paper.
SAM BURRELL: I was just going, oh man, that sounds really tedious. But I think it was in that section there was a comment that one of the reasons that Transaction was still publishing them is because actually what you can take in in an hour when someone's reading a paper, you don't get the detail of it. And there's a benefit in being able to sit, and read, and think about it later. The other thing that was interesting about that was that you know, even though the Royal Society wasn't encouraging discussion, the discussion was occurring in kind of social events that kind of sat around that meeting, you know?
SAM BURRELL: They all retired to the pub and talked about it afterwards in the pub. So I think my reading of it is that it's still fair to go to that in person stuff, and that discussion was related at that point to what was in Transactions. And it's just I think, we're at a point now where the world has changed so much, and the way we communicate with each other.
SAM BURRELL: And the way we can communicate with each other has changed dramatically that it feels like all the cards are kind of thrown back up in the air about what it is, what the various functions are of what a journal does, what a society does, how society should support its community, how-- I mean, the piece that I keep coming back to is the acknowledged importance of communicating the results of scientific research, you know, now that we're in a world where actually that's fundamental to the way we exist, and fundamental to our surviving our planet, and keeping society going.
SAM BURRELL: At the heart of that is scientific research and communicating it well. It's interesting to me that the funding of it is still so vexed. And I wonder what role societies play, or can play in solving that problem. Is it a role for societies?
AILEEN FYFE: Well, if societies want to keep publishing, then yes, they're going to have to solve it somehow. I mean, I think there's probably a question of rethinking the role of publishing, and so in thinking in role of publishing within society finances, because for the last 30 or 40 years some societies have been able to enjoy very large amounts of income from publishing, and have maybe forgotten, or don't have the institutional memory to recall that that's actually a relatively new phenomenon.
AILEEN FYFE: But with that money, of course, they've done all sorts of good things, and it's quite difficult to imagine going back to not having that money. But societies do have a lot of goodwill, and they have the benefit that the technologies have at last changed, so all the people who were hoping for a technological revolution that would make everything cheaper. Well, we have now got that.
AILEEN FYFE: But I mean, one of the challenges I see for the learned societies is one of scale again, and it's not just a question of whether you're a British society, but you've got international readers or international authors. It's also from the publishing technological side, that if you are one learned society, you probably don't have the expertise in house to run a journal all by yourself.
AILEEN FYFE: You probably have to buy in some software, or you have to get a publishing partner, these kinds of things. Societies have always had to have a printing partner, because no society that I've looked at ever ran its own printing press. I'm just suddenly thinking. Maybe I do know one in Stockholm. Anyway, generally speaking, societies pay someone to do the printing.
AILEEN FYFE: And that was relatively straightforward, a single production with one printer. Whereas now, we're in a world where it's all digital. It seems it's on computer. Maybe we could do it ourselves. It ought to be easy. But actually, to do it well is quite difficult. You still need professional skills to do that, but it might be a different set of service providers than the ones we've traditionally worked with.
AILEEN FYFE: And how would you know where to go, and what to do differently in negotiating the way through these changing technologies and the changing options? Do you have something built for you? Do you buy an off the shelf piece of software? Do you work in partnership? How are you going to do it? There's so many options it seems at the moment.
AILEEN FYFE: That is quite tricky I think for small societies in particular to negotiate. I'm tending to think that some kind of collaborative economies of scale between like-minded societies would help with that. And there was an amusing quote from the 1950's case when learned societies were really worried when somebody said, it would be really good if learned societies would work together, to which the answer was at that point, learned societies don't have the habit of cooperating, and therefore, we can't do this collaboratively.
AILEEN FYFE: We'll have to do it individually. You might hope maybe that's changed too.
SAM BURRELL: I think the will has changed, but I think the reality of it is still really challenging of you know. The session that runs previous to this one is on governance, and one of the challenges that societies have around decision making, and the fact that many societies have a governance system that was set up way too long ago, and it's not evolved, such that let's say, you've got a president that has a tenure of a year.
SAM BURRELL: And so you have this issue of you know, a society may wish to go in a particular direction, but it's quite hard to achieve that if you've got leadership that rotates to such a vast degree that the society itself can't carry out necessarily a sustained direction. I mean, one of the things that I think about periodically is, does the world need N number of societies in Y niche? You kind of go, how many I don't know, electrochemical societies does the world need?
SAM BURRELL: Is there a space for a more global coalition of learned societies, not just necessarily, potentially to do publishing? I think doing that globally might be tricky. But kind of the more community, there's value in the regional groups, but there also might be value in a kind of global. I don't know. Go.
AILEEN FYFE: I was going to say, I think that happens though in some fields where there are collaborations of usually, national societies who also worked together at a higher level, because I think from anything that's in person benefits from smaller scale. But once you move on to the publishing, or the sharing of infrastructure, then you want more people, and more scale to work with. Something we haven't alluded to much, I just wanted to drop this in on, is the you talked about the governance decision making, but there's the editorial side of things, because we talked quite a bit about the finances.
AILEEN FYFE: And there was another reason that has been argued why learned societies are important, or groups of scholars actually rather than necessarily learn societies are important in journal editing. Because if you're going to decide what to publish, who's got the expertise to do that, is it professional publishers, or is it academics in the field? And right up until the 1950's or '60s, it was assumed that commercial publishers couldn't publish primary research, because they didn't have access to a pool of experts who could tell them.
AILEEN FYFE: We all know I think, how that has shifted over the last 50 years. But the idea that the groups of scholars who are the peer reviewers, or the editorial boards, they're the people who know what's going on in the field, and can judge if this is at least plausible, and hopefully, original. Even if you don't think about it at the level of the individual paper and what you're accepting or not accepting, the society, or the editorial board, whoever is acting as a form of gatekeeping for what is good research look like in our field, because that's one of the things we're doing.
AILEEN FYFE: Do you get published in one of the journals in our field? Or is your work deemed to be not the right kind of thing for some reason or another? And so that kind of intellectual gatekeeping is also another important role that journals perform, and that you can understand why groups of scholars, or learning societies, or associations would seem like a more natural group of people to do that. I think that's why we see some of the big commercial publishers now trying to invent a version of that by creating peer review colleges, and trying to create a pool of scholars, or earlier, actually creating international editorial boards to do the same kind of thing, because they don't have it naturally.
AILEEN FYFE: But that kind of gatekeeping--
SAM BURRELL: Interesting, yeah. One thing that stuck out to me that I thought was quite funny was it was from the 1920 section, someone was complaining about how difficult it was to get peer reviewers because everyone was so busy and they didn't have time. And I just I looked at that and had a little chuckle to myself. Well, nothing changes. [LAUGHING] I'm just keeping an eye on the time, and we're quite close to time.
SAM BURRELL: I think given that you've basically spent the last nine years in the kind of detail of society publications and societies, not just the Royal Society, because there's the other societies that sort of were spawned subsequently, are you optimistic from here about the future of learned societies and what they can contribute to the landscape?
AILEEN FYFE: Yes, I am, but I think it's still going to take time, because one of the things I think you can see from looking at the 350 years is that the journal called Philosophical Transactions has survived through all of that, and equally, the Royal Society has survived through all of that, but it doesn't look the same as it did. The way it survives is by changing, whether we're talking about the periodical or the institution. But change does come slowly, particularly because of the government structures involve committees, and more committees, and reporting, and lots of that, that sort of thing.
AILEEN FYFE: It does take time. And so I'm not totally surprised that learned societies now are still wrestling with something that in the scale of chronology I've been working on is still quite a recent change, the arrival of internet and the possible demands for open access. This is all really quite recent still. And I think it will take longer to work through it. But learned society structures may be slow to change.
AILEEN FYFE: They may sometimes be cumbersome and bureaucratic, but they can adapt and survive, because I guess, they've got kind of vested interest in doing so. You just have to work out how to get it past your members, and try to work out or rewrite the statutes, or change the mission, or whatever it is. The general structure, the idea is sound. And from the Royal Society's history, they have a publishing review pretty much every 20 or 25 years.
AILEEN FYFE: You can see all the way through the 20th century. And there's that kind of cycle of, oh, we must do something about publishing and reforming. The Royal Society had just had one, which is why they decided to flip the journals to open access. But the time we were writing about, they were long overdue, where all staff saying they really need to have another review.
AILEEN FYFE: We need to sort this out. But yeah, I mean, I am optimistic, and I want learned societies and subject associations, scholarly associations to remain important in journal publishing for all the reasons we spoke about earlier, about the intellectual gatekeeping, both the prestige, the community. And I'm not so keen on the idea of all our journals being published by a small number of commercial firms.
AILEEN FYFE: That said, those commercial firms were actually really important in the 1950's and '60s. And there are definitely some positives to them as well, but I am also a fan of learned societies.
SAM BURRELL: That's brilliant. Thank you so much. Now, just before we go, tell us about your book, which is the bit that I didn't do, because clearly, we haven't been able to cover all of the stuff in It Tell us just quickly about title, where we can get it, that kind of stuff.
AILEEN FYFE: Well, I have a physical copy right here.
SAM BURRELL: Yay.
AILEEN FYFE: is called A History of Scientific Journals, Publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015. So this, as you can see, is a fairly substantial physical copy. It is however, open access, available from UCL Press totally free to download. Or if you want a Kindle edition, I believe it's mentioning. So please, do go and read it. It's organized chronologically. And I entirely understand if some people just want to read the introduction, the conclusion, and their favorite chapter depending on what period they're interested in.
AILEEN FYFE: And I think one of the joys actually of the open access publishing is that you don't have to feel guilty about doing that, because you can just download the PDF with the bits you want and get what you need out of it, and then come back to it some other time if you want to. I've been very excited about the open access publishing model, because we've had some 1800 downloads already, and the book has been out for a month, which is just phenomenally different and better than any other book I've ever published.
SAM BURRELL: That's amazing. But I would argue that's not just because it's open access. It's also because it's a topic that comes at a time that's on clearly, 1,800 people's minds, if not, loads more. Thank you so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it. And speak to you again soon.
AILEEN FYFE: Thank you, Sam. Been a pleasure.
SAM BURRELL: Thank you. All right.