Abstract
As scientists question the recent dominance of the scientific journal, the varied richness of its past offers useful materials for reflection. This paper examines four innovative journals founded and run by leading publishers and men of science in the 1810s and 1820s, which contributed to a significant reimagining of the form. Relying on a new distinction between the ‘literary’ and the ‘scientific’ to define their market, those who produced the journals intended to maximize their readership and profits by making them to some extent ‘popular’. While these attempts ended in commercial failure, not least because of the rapidly diversifying periodical market in which they operated, their history makes clear the important role that commerce has played both in defining the purposes and audiences of scientific journals and in the conceptualization of the scientific project. It also informs the ongoing debate concerning how the multiple audiences for science can be addressed in ways that are commercially and practically viable.
Highlights
As scientists question the recent dominance of the scientific journal, the varied richness of its past offers useful materials for reflection
Relying on a new distinction between the ‘literary’ and the ‘scientific’ to define their market, those who produced the journals intended to maximize their readership and profits by making them to some extent ‘popular’. While these attempts ended in commercial failure, not least because of the rapidly diversifying periodical market in which they operated, their history makes clear the important role that commerce has played both in defining the purposes and audiences of scientific journals and in the conceptualization of the scientific project
After taking a half-share in that magazine in August 1818, John Murray had told Blackwood that he thought that its ‘prominent feature’ should be ‘literary and scientific news, and most of all the latter, for which your editors appear to have little estimation’, since this was ‘ten times more interesting to the public than any other class of literature at present’
Summary
As scientists question the recent dominance of the scientific journal, the varied richness of its past offers useful materials for reflection.
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