Making public ahead of print : meetings and publications at the Royal Society, 1752-1892
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Date
20/12/2016Keywords
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Abstract
This essay examines the interplay between the meetings and publications of learned scientific societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when journals were an established but not yet dominant form of scholarly communication. The practice of ‘making public’ research at meetings, long before actual ‘publication’ in society periodicals, enabled a complex of more-or-less formal sites of communication and discussion ahead of print. Using two case studies from the Royal Society of London – Jan Ingen-Housz in 1782 and John Tyndall in 1857/8 – we reveal how different individuals navigated and exploited the power structures, social activities and seasonal rhythms of learned societies, all necessary precursors to gaining admission to the editorial processes of society journals, and trace the shifting significance of meetings in the increasingly competitive and diverse realm of Victorian scientific publishing. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these historical perspectives for current discussions of the ‘ends’ of the scientific journal.
Citation
Fyfe , A & Moxham , N 2016 , ' Making public ahead of print : meetings and publications at the Royal Society, 1752-1892 ' , Notes and Records of the Royal Society , vol. 70 , no. 4 , pp. 361-379 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0030
Publication
Notes and Records of the Royal Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-9149Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 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
This research was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, grant AH/K001841/1.Collections
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