The Scientific Journal : Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century / Alex Csiszar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Csiszar, Alex, author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--Periodicals--Publishing--History--19th century.

Science.

Communication in science.

Technical writing--History--19th century.

Technical writing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (389 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction: "Broken Pieces of Fact"

1. The Press and Academic Judgment

2. Meeting in Public

3. The Author and the Referee

4. Discovery, Publication, and Property

5. What Is a Scientific Paper?

6. Access Fantasies at the Fin de Siècle

Conclusion: Impact Stories

Acknowledgments

Archives and Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226553375

022655337X

OCLC:

1035556613