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Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques-low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives-to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era.A f

Watch the VIDEO. Keynote presentation. The current debates about the future of academic publishing have generated much discussion about the most appropriate way to support financially the widespread circulation of knowledge. Yet there have been debates about this since at least the 1890s. Drawing upon my historical research, I will describe how scholarly publishing has a long history of not making money. Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century, its costs were frequently sponsored (i.e. subsidised) by learned societies, by universities, by government and by private donors. It was only in the early Cold War years, in a time of expanding output of research, that mission-driven publishers began to seriously focus on sales income as a means of covering costs; and then, later, as a means of generating income. Should publishing be treated as mission, or as a means to mission? My talk will seek to untangle the historical relationship between publishing, money-making and scholarly mission.

Science in the marketplace : an introduction / Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman -- How scientific conversation became shop talk / James A. Secord -- The diffusion of phrenology through public lecturing / John van Wyhe -- Lecturing in the spatial economy of science / Bernard Lightman -- Publishing "popular science" in early nineteenth-century Britain / Jonathan R. Topham -- Sensitive, bashful, and chaste? articulating the mimosa in science -- Ann B. Shteir -- Reading natural history at the British Museum and the Pictorial Museum / Aileen Fyfe -- Illuminating the expert-consumer relationship in domestic electricity / Graeme Gooday -- Natural history on display : the collection of Charles Waterton / Victoria Carroll -- Science at the crystal focus of the world / Richard Bellon -- "More the aspect of magic than anything natural" : the philosophy of demonstration / Iwan Rhys Morus -- The museum affect : visiting collections of anatomy and natural history / Samuel J. M. M. Alberti

This article examines the evolution of peer review and the modern editorial processes of scholarly journals by analyzing a novel data set derived from the Royal Society's archives and covering 1865-1965, that is, the historical period in which refereeing (not yet known as peer review) became firmly established. Our analysis reveals how the Royal Society's editorial processes coped with both an increasing reliance on refereeing and a growth in submissions, while maintaining collective responsibility and minimizing research waste. By engaging more of its fellows in editorial activity, the society was able to establish an equilibrium of number of submissions per reviewer that was relatively stable over time. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the distribution of editorial work was significantly uneven. Our findings reveal interesting parallels with current concerns about the scale and distribution of peer review work and suggest the strategic importance of the management of the editorial process to achieve a creative mix of community commitment and professional responsibility that is essential in contemporary journals.

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 communications technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns. We show that the business practices and the cultural significance of academic publishing have been significantly transformed since the late nineteenth century as increasing government funding drove the expansion and professionalization of the research community, a process that accelerated rapidly after the Second World War. We examine how academic publishing practices have responded to the increasing number of researchers and publications worldwide, the changing expectations of academic workloads and outputs in the higher education sector, and the new business models in the publishing industry. A key phenomenon has been the growing importance of published works as career-defining tokens of prestige for academics. Although the new technologies that emerged in the late twentieth century offer great potential for improving the speed and efficiency of scholarly communication, the publishing model has been relatively slow to change.

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 communications technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns. We show that the business practices and the cultural significance of academic publishing have been significantly transformed since the late nineteenth century as increasing government funding drove the expansion and professionalization of the research community, a process that accelerated rapidly after the Second World War. We examine how academic publishing practices have responded to the increasing number of researchers and publications worldwide, the changing expectations of academic workloads and outputs in the higher education sector, and the new business models in the publishing industry. A key phenomenon has been the growing importance of published works as career-defining tokens of prestige for academics. Although the new technologies that emerged in the late twentieth century offer great potential for improving the speed and efficiency of scholarly communication, the publishing model has been relatively slow to change.

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 communications technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns.We show that the business practices and the cultural significance of academic publishing have been significantly transformed since the late nineteenth century as increasing government funding drove the expansion and professionalization of the research community, a process that accelerated rapidly after the Second World War. We examine how academic publishing practices have responded to the increasing number of researchers and publications worldwide, the changing expectations of academic workloads and outputs in the higher education sector, and the new business models in the publishing industry. A key phenomenon has been the growing importance of published works as career-defining tokens of prestige for academics. Although the new technologies that emerged in the late twentieth century offer great potential for improving the speed and efficiency of scholarly communication, the publishing model has been relatively slow to change.