From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century
Abstract
Scientific journal publishing has become a lucrative enterprise, for commercial firms and (some) learned societies alike; but it was not always thus. The Royal Society is the publisher of the world’s longest-running scientific journal, and for most of the history of the Philosophical Transactions, its publication was a severe drain on the Society’s finances. This paper uses the rich archives of the Royal Society to investigate the economic transformation of journal publishing over the course of the twentieth century. It began the century as a scholarly mission activity heavily subsidised by the Society, but ended it as a valuable income stream. Never-before-seen data reveal three phases: the end of the philanthropic model of circulation; the transition to a sales-based commercial model amidst the post-war boom in subscriber numbers; and the challenges facing that new business model once the subscriber numbers went into decline in the late twentieth century. The paper does not directly address the open access movement of the twenty-first century, but is essential reading to understand the financial background.
Citation
Fyfe , A 2022 , ' From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century ' , Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science , vol. Ahead of Print . https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0021
Publication
Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-9149Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
Funding: Arts and Humanities Research Council - AH/K001841.Collections
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