Not since the printing press has a media object been as celebrated for its role in the advancement of knowledge as the scientific journal. From open communication to peer review, the scientific ...journal has long been central both to the identity of academic scientists and to the public legitimacy of scientific knowledge. But that was not always the case. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, academies and societies dominated elite study of the natural world. Journals were a relatively marginal feature of this world, and sometimes even an object of outright suspicion. The Scientific Journal tells the story of how that changed. Alex Csiszar takes readers deep into nineteenth-century London and Paris, where savants struggled to reshape scientific life in the light of rapidly changing political mores and the growing importance of the press in public life. The scientific journal did not arise as a natural solution to the problem of communicating scientific discoveries. Rather, as Csiszar shows, its dominance was a hard-won compromise born of political exigencies, shifting epistemic values, intellectual property debates, and the demands of commerce. Many of the tensions and problems that plague scholarly publishing today are rooted in these tangled beginnings. As we seek to make sense of our own moment of intense experimentation in publishing platforms, peer review, and information curation, Csiszar argues powerfully that a better understanding of the journal's past will be crucial to imagining future forms for the expression and organization of knowledge.
Troubled from the start Csiszar, Alex
Nature (London),
04/2016, Letnik:
532, Številka:
7599
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What's more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved ...continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, functions and values. But one thing stands out: pivotal moments in the history of peer review have occurred when the public status of science was being renegotiated.
According to Gentlemen of Science, a 1981 book by science historians Arnold Thackray and Jack Morrell, the events hosted 1,000 or more spectators. (The botanist Joseph Hooker, who worked at the Royal ...Botanical Gardens at Kew near London, suspected that Nature would fail because it was trying to do what The Athenaeum already did.) If you were an elite scientist and you wanted international colleagues to know about your research, you might aim to get your paper covered in The Athenaeum because readers often passed their copies on to others. ANDREA CASE CODE OF CONDUCT In early 2017, the organizers of an annual evolution meeting got together to address concerns about how to handle inappropriate behaviour at conferences - whether sexual or gender harassment, exclusion or discrimination. For our meeting that June, held jointly by the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists and the Society of Systematic Biologists, we established a formal code of conduct. Because it was a new policy, conference attendees had to agree to it when registering for the meeting.
The Catalogue of Scientific Papers, published by the Royal Society of London beginning in 1867, projected back to the beginning of the nineteenth century a novel vision of the history of science in ...which knowledge was built up out of discrete papers each connected to an author. Its construction was an act of canon formation that helped naturalize the idea that scientific publishing consisted of special kinds of texts and authors that were set apart from the wider landscape of publishing. By recovering the decisions and struggles through which the Catalogue was assembled, this essay aims to contribute to current efforts to denaturalize the scientific paper as the dominant genre of scientific life. By privileging a specific representation of the course of a scientific life as a list of papers, the Catalogue helped shape underlying assumptions about the most valuable fruits of a scientific career. Its enumerated lists of authors’ periodical publications were quickly put to use as a means of measuring scientific productivity and reputation, as well as by writers of biography and history. Although it was first conceived as a search technology, this essay locates the Catalogue’s most consequential legacy in its uses as a technology of valuation.
The 1890s saw an explosion of ambitious projects to build a massive classification of knowledge that would serve as a basis for universal catalogues of scientific publishing. The largest of these ...were the rival International Catalogue of Scientific Literature (London) and Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (Brussels). This essay argues that one widely influential but overlooked source of the enthusiasm for classification as a technology of search and retrieval during this period was the emergence of new methods and technologies for classifying and keeping track of people, and in particular, the criminal identification laboratory of Alphonse Bertillon located in Paris.
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