Science and society, or research institution and journal: A historical retrospection

Abstract

For the publication of this new journal, we shall review the role of a journal in science and technology research from the perspective of history of science. In the age when there is a plethora of academic journals, it is necessary to state the significance of publishing yet another journal. We believe this will offer food for thought in seeking the direction the journal should take to make scientific and technological contributions to the society, which is our ultimate goal. For this purpose, we shall describe how academic journals, which we take for granted as places to report our research activities, were born. The birth of modern science greatly owes to the exceptional works of people whom we call intellectual giants such as Galileo and Newton. However, in the background of their success in revolutionizing knowledge in the 17th century were the existences of research institutions and their vehicles or journals that disseminated scientific knowledge to the world. Isaac Newton wrote papers on classical mechanics and optics in Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society of London, for which he later became chairman, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, woolen merchant and amateur biologist, sent a letter describing the world’s first observation of microbes using his handmade microscope. The Royal Society of London and Accademia del Cimento of Rome encouraged active communication between the members, and published journals to deliver fresh, real-time information. Communalism, which is one of the important ethos (personalities and habits of a group) of scientific community advocated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 20th century, was already established during the age of scientific revolution, and gathering concentrated evidences and disclosure of these information were expected to become useful for the welfare of humankind. The thinking that swift and active disclosure of knowledge will benefit mutual research exchange among scientists and will eventually contribute to the society originates from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620). In the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, the Ancients claimed that truth was revealed in classical knowledge exemplified by Aristotle, while Modernist Bacon emphasized the necessity of accumulating new knowledge or empirical knowledge obtained through experiments and observations, in order to look further in the distance “riding on the giant’s shoulders”. In his posthumous work, New Atlantis, he described the concept of a nation founded on science that will rise in a distant future, and discussed the model of a knowledge system for making contributions to the society. The principle of establishment of academic societies such as the Royal Society was influenced greatly by Bacon’s new concept. Although the system for promoting intellectual exchange among members by publishing the results of research in form of theses in journals was already established in the 17th century, most of them addressed natural historical oddities and extraordinary natural phenomena, and none focused on industrial significance of scientific products. Although facts were reported with honesty and candor, very few included deductive inference based on high-level logic, and hardly any addressed industrial application. The scientific journals started to address social issues only in the 19th century when disciplines matured and individual societies and their journals were published. The characteristic of scientific journals was totally transformed after the Industrial Revolution when discussion on the utility of knowledge became active. Two hundred years after Bacon’s conceptualization, the perspective for evaluating knowledge with a measuring stick of “useful knowledge” was born. Later, through births of national support systems, research institutions, and universities of science, the scientific community was systematically organized into autonomous knowledge organization whose freedom of research was guaranteed, and science was eventually positioned at the core of the national plan. However, as symbolized by the establishment of Ig Nobel Prize in the end of the 20th century, knowledge for knowledge’s sake was pursued and “useless” researches that lacked relevance to the real world were mass-produced. In this state of affairs, retracing the original purpose of scientific journals and their historical roots is an essential exercise in re-evaluating the relationship between modern science and society.