Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2013) 67, 297–300 doi:10.1098/rsnr.2013.0059 Published online 18 September 2013
EDITORIAL
THE NEXT 75 YEARS
With this issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society we come to the end of our 75th year of publication. Since our first issue in 1938, the world of periodical publishing in the history of science, technology and medicine has undergone profound changes. Many new journals have been founded, bringing the number of leading titles in the field to more than even the 61 that added their name to the protest against the European Research Index in the Humanities in 2009, the ill-starred initiative that sought to classify journals according to highly contestable criteria.1 And journals have grown substantially bigger. The oldest general periodical in our field, Isis, published 376 pages of articles and reviews in that year, distributed between two issues; in 2012, its hundredth year, its four issues ran to a total of 836 pages, in addition to its annual critical bibliography of almost 4000 items (compared with roughly one-third of that number in the two critical bibliographies of 1938). Proliferation and expansion of this kind show no sign of slowing. But changes of a more fundamental kind are now sweeping through the world of scholarly publishing. The move to online publishing has already imposed a rethinking of the future of the hard-copy journal, so costly to produce and so greedy for space on library shelves. The attractions of this new departure are understandable: articles published online, without waiting to be gathered between the covers of an issue, reach their readers sooner than they do by the traditional route. The current push towards Open Access, by which journals make their articles freely available online either immediately on publication (‘Gold’ Open Access) or allow authors to make a version of their paper available online after a short embargo period (‘Green’ Open Access), is also challenging current practices and accelerating the publishing process. Ensuring that knowledge is accessible promptly to any who care to acquire it is an admirable ideal, of course. However, we need to reflect carefully on the implications, not least for authors who (from their own pockets or the funds provided through their institutions or funding agencies) would be required to pay the fees to make Open Access financially possible. Such a model may well work for the sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences it is fraught with dangers. As a recent session, ‘The future of journals in the history of science, technology, and medicine’, at the XXIVth International Congress of History of Science in Manchester showed, editors, authors, publishers and librarians face the next two or three years, let alone the next 75, with apprehension. How will learned societies whose income depends so heavily on subscriptions to their journals adjust to having their wares made easily and quickly available to all? And will commercial publishing houses be willing to continue supporting titles for which subscriptions might begin to decline as part of the same process? Is there a risk that, as Open Access advances and electronic editions gain favour, editors and their advisory boards will be reduced to the status of remote agents in the passage of articles as fast as possible from submission to computer screens across the world? In those circumstances,
297
q 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
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R. Fox
what role would there be for a journal’s editorial input? The expressions of anxiety in Manchester were not to be read as in any way defeatist or dismissive of the opportunities offered by the new world on which, for good or ill, scholarly publishing is now embarking. But they did convey unease and a clear sense of the continuing value of journals not just in the processing of individual contributions but also in the construction of issues whose impact so often depends on the profile of the whole rather than its constituent elements. Notes and Records will follow the unfolding changes closely. Meanwhile, it will make a small but not insignificant adjustment to its title. This will be the last issue published as Notes and Records of the Royal Society. Beginning with the March 2014 issue, we shall appear as Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, a title that almost brings us back to the one used on the cover of the first issue of the journal (see figure 1). Even assiduous readers of Notes and Records may be unaware of this partial return to our roots, because it is rare to find a copy of the April 1938 issue whose cover has survived the binding process in libraries that have commonly jettisoned covers, advertisements and other supposedly ephemeral material and thereby deprived historians of a valuable resource. The main purpose of the change of title, though, is to reinforce the principle that this journal treats all aspects and all periods of the history of science, technology and medicine and not just history related to the Royal Society and its Fellows. Two contributions to the present issue convey our wish to promote the journal’s broad focus. One is Faidra Papanelopoulou’s study of the role of the French physicist Louis Paul Cailletet in the liquefaction of the first of the permanent gases to be liquefied— oxygen in 1877—and the implications of his achievement for our understanding of several broader historiographical questions, including the contribution of workshop skills (in which Cailletet was unusually well versed), the delicate matter of determining priority claims (involving, in this case, Sigmund Wro´blewski and Karol Olszewski in Cracow), and the promotion of Cailletet as an exemplar of France’s revival in science after half a century or so of supposed decline. The other is ‘Geology and religion in Portugal’ by Ana Maria Carneiro, Ana Simoes, Maria Paula Diogo and Teresa Salome´ Mota. The starting point of this article is the Portuguese Enlightenment when, despite the rational turn of contemporary thought, priests of the Catholic Church were happy to pursue geological investigations in ways that saw no systematic incompatibility between science and faith. It is salutary evidence for us in the twenty-first century, when we are familiar— arguably too familiar—with the long history of conflict between secular and religious modes of thought and with the ramifications of the history that still surface in public debate. In his study of Edmund Halley’s views on the age of the world, Dmitri Levitin insists, like Carneiro, Simoes, Diogo and Mota, on the need for studies of science and religion to engage with the complexity of the interaction and to enter into the fine structure of the evidence, in his case textual evidence that Simon Schaffer interpreted, in a pioneering article in this journal in 1977, as pointing to Halley’s commitment to ‘scientific consistency’ rather than to any supposed separation between his publicly professed religious orthodoxy and a privately held heterodox belief in the eternity of the divine creation.2 Interpreting scanty, difficult sources rather differently from Schaffer, Levitin argues that although Halley’s statements do indeed suggest a strong measure of consistency, they also bear witness to a conciliatory tone that cannot be dissociated from contemporary rumour about the theological unsoundness of what seems to have been his sustained acceptance of the great antiquity of the Earth rather than the more dangerous doctrine of its eternity.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
Editorial
299
Figure 1. The cover of the first issue of Notes and Records, dated April 1938. The design of the cover, with its central image taken from the Royal Society’s Charter Book, was the work of Cecile M. Driffield. The journal replaced a short-lived publication, Occasional Notices, launched in the previous year to keep Fellows better informed of the Society’s activities. In the words of the first editorial of Notes and Records, it was felt that, in addition to its function as a newsletter, the new venture ‘might usefully include information of historical interest that would not be printed in Philosophical Transaction or Proceedings’. Although Notes and Records continued to announce events in the Society’s calendar for some time, historical contributions soon came to dominate its pages. (Copyright q British Library Board/The Royal Society (Ac. 3025/35).) (Online version in colour.)
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
300
R. Fox
Paul Henderson’s article recounts the curious story of the sword that the artist and natural historian James Sowerby made from a celebrated meteorite discovered in southern Africa in the eighteenth century. The article throws interesting light on the life and preoccupations of a scientific devotee working with limited access to the frequent personal encounters and correspondence networks that cemented the world of elite science in early nineteenthcentury Britain. Although Sowerby was never a Fellow of the Royal Society, the sword (which Sowerby intended for presentation to the Emperor of Russia on the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814) attracted the attention of Sir Joseph Banks and others in the wake of the renewed scientific interest in meteorites as specimens of otherwise inaccessible matter existing beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The two remaining articles in the issue concern major figures whose places at the pinnacles of British science are beyond question. One, by Ruth Richardson and Bryan Rhodes, examines Joseph Lister’s first major abdominal operation, conducted in 1851 in his capacity as a house surgeon at University College Hospital, London, while he was still a medical student. The article, which points to Lister’s exemplary handling of the case of a woman with an eviscerating stab wound, complements the collection of essays that appeared, under the guest editorship of Brian Hurwitz and Marguerite Dupree, as our September 2013 issue.3 The other, by Neil Calver, presents a new perspective on the place of Peter Medawar among the twentieth century’s most distinguished communicators of science. Although Medawar’s admiration for the philosophy of Karl Popper is well known, there was more to his perception of Popper’s significance than has been commonly recognized. For Calver, Medawar’s Popper had as much to contribute to our understanding of the role of imagination in scientific enquiry as he did to problems related to the concept of falsification for which he is best known, especially among philosophers. In his analysis of Popper, as Calver shows, Medawar presented scientific enquiry as involving creative processes akin to, if not identical with, those of poets and artists. It is no coincidence that Medawar’s initial engagement with Popper’s work dates from the late 1950s, the high point of the ‘two cultures’ debate, given prominence by C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959. By the time that Medawar died, in 1987, he still had much to contribute to this and other aspects of the tending of the public face of science through insights that won the respect of scientists and non-scientists alike. Those who are concerned with such matters in our own day can only regret the silencing of a voice that would have injected a welcome mite of elegance and subtlety into the sometimes gross confrontations that surfaced in the culture wars of the 1990s and are still not entirely extinguished from discussions about the place of science in general literate culture in our own day. Robert Fox [email protected]
NOTES 1 2 3
‘Journals under threat: a joint response from history of science, technology and medicine editors’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 63, 1–3 (2009). Simon Schaffer, ‘Halley’s atheism and the end of the world’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 32, 17–40 (1977). Brian Hurwitz and Marguerite W. Dupree (guest editors), ‘Learning from Lister’, a special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society, vol. 67, no. 3 (September 2013).
Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2013) 67, 297–300 doi:10.1098/rsnr.2013.0059 Published online 18 September 2013
EDITORIAL
THE NEXT 75 YEARS
With this issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society we come to the end of our 75th year of publication. Since our first issue in 1938, the world of periodical publishing in the history of science, technology and medicine has undergone profound changes. Many new journals have been founded, bringing the number of leading titles in the field to more than even the 61 that added their name to the protest against the European Research Index in the Humanities in 2009, the ill-starred initiative that sought to classify journals according to highly contestable criteria.1 And journals have grown substantially bigger. The oldest general periodical in our field, Isis, published 376 pages of articles and reviews in that year, distributed between two issues; in 2012, its hundredth year, its four issues ran to a total of 836 pages, in addition to its annual critical bibliography of almost 4000 items (compared with roughly one-third of that number in the two critical bibliographies of 1938). Proliferation and expansion of this kind show no sign of slowing. But changes of a more fundamental kind are now sweeping through the world of scholarly publishing. The move to online publishing has already imposed a rethinking of the future of the hard-copy journal, so costly to produce and so greedy for space on library shelves. The attractions of this new departure are understandable: articles published online, without waiting to be gathered between the covers of an issue, reach their readers sooner than they do by the traditional route. The current push towards Open Access, by which journals make their articles freely available online either immediately on publication (‘Gold’ Open Access) or allow authors to make a version of their paper available online after a short embargo period (‘Green’ Open Access), is also challenging current practices and accelerating the publishing process. Ensuring that knowledge is accessible promptly to any who care to acquire it is an admirable ideal, of course. However, we need to reflect carefully on the implications, not least for authors who (from their own pockets or the funds provided through their institutions or funding agencies) would be required to pay the fees to make Open Access financially possible. Such a model may well work for the sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences it is fraught with dangers. As a recent session, ‘The future of journals in the history of science, technology, and medicine’, at the XXIVth International Congress of History of Science in Manchester showed, editors, authors, publishers and librarians face the next two or three years, let alone the next 75, with apprehension. How will learned societies whose income depends so heavily on subscriptions to their journals adjust to having their wares made easily and quickly available to all? And will commercial publishing houses be willing to continue supporting titles for which subscriptions might begin to decline as part of the same process? Is there a risk that, as Open Access advances and electronic editions gain favour, editors and their advisory boards will be reduced to the status of remote agents in the passage of articles as fast as possible from submission to computer screens across the world? In those circumstances,
297
q 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
298
R. Fox
what role would there be for a journal’s editorial input? The expressions of anxiety in Manchester were not to be read as in any way defeatist or dismissive of the opportunities offered by the new world on which, for good or ill, scholarly publishing is now embarking. But they did convey unease and a clear sense of the continuing value of journals not just in the processing of individual contributions but also in the construction of issues whose impact so often depends on the profile of the whole rather than its constituent elements. Notes and Records will follow the unfolding changes closely. Meanwhile, it will make a small but not insignificant adjustment to its title. This will be the last issue published as Notes and Records of the Royal Society. Beginning with the March 2014 issue, we shall appear as Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, a title that almost brings us back to the one used on the cover of the first issue of the journal (see figure 1). Even assiduous readers of Notes and Records may be unaware of this partial return to our roots, because it is rare to find a copy of the April 1938 issue whose cover has survived the binding process in libraries that have commonly jettisoned covers, advertisements and other supposedly ephemeral material and thereby deprived historians of a valuable resource. The main purpose of the change of title, though, is to reinforce the principle that this journal treats all aspects and all periods of the history of science, technology and medicine and not just history related to the Royal Society and its Fellows. Two contributions to the present issue convey our wish to promote the journal’s broad focus. One is Faidra Papanelopoulou’s study of the role of the French physicist Louis Paul Cailletet in the liquefaction of the first of the permanent gases to be liquefied— oxygen in 1877—and the implications of his achievement for our understanding of several broader historiographical questions, including the contribution of workshop skills (in which Cailletet was unusually well versed), the delicate matter of determining priority claims (involving, in this case, Sigmund Wro´blewski and Karol Olszewski in Cracow), and the promotion of Cailletet as an exemplar of France’s revival in science after half a century or so of supposed decline. The other is ‘Geology and religion in Portugal’ by Ana Maria Carneiro, Ana Simoes, Maria Paula Diogo and Teresa Salome´ Mota. The starting point of this article is the Portuguese Enlightenment when, despite the rational turn of contemporary thought, priests of the Catholic Church were happy to pursue geological investigations in ways that saw no systematic incompatibility between science and faith. It is salutary evidence for us in the twenty-first century, when we are familiar— arguably too familiar—with the long history of conflict between secular and religious modes of thought and with the ramifications of the history that still surface in public debate. In his study of Edmund Halley’s views on the age of the world, Dmitri Levitin insists, like Carneiro, Simoes, Diogo and Mota, on the need for studies of science and religion to engage with the complexity of the interaction and to enter into the fine structure of the evidence, in his case textual evidence that Simon Schaffer interpreted, in a pioneering article in this journal in 1977, as pointing to Halley’s commitment to ‘scientific consistency’ rather than to any supposed separation between his publicly professed religious orthodoxy and a privately held heterodox belief in the eternity of the divine creation.2 Interpreting scanty, difficult sources rather differently from Schaffer, Levitin argues that although Halley’s statements do indeed suggest a strong measure of consistency, they also bear witness to a conciliatory tone that cannot be dissociated from contemporary rumour about the theological unsoundness of what seems to have been his sustained acceptance of the great antiquity of the Earth rather than the more dangerous doctrine of its eternity.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
Editorial
299
Figure 1. The cover of the first issue of Notes and Records, dated April 1938. The design of the cover, with its central image taken from the Royal Society’s Charter Book, was the work of Cecile M. Driffield. The journal replaced a short-lived publication, Occasional Notices, launched in the previous year to keep Fellows better informed of the Society’s activities. In the words of the first editorial of Notes and Records, it was felt that, in addition to its function as a newsletter, the new venture ‘might usefully include information of historical interest that would not be printed in Philosophical Transaction or Proceedings’. Although Notes and Records continued to announce events in the Society’s calendar for some time, historical contributions soon came to dominate its pages. (Copyright q British Library Board/The Royal Society (Ac. 3025/35).) (Online version in colour.)
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 29, 2015
300
R. Fox
Paul Henderson’s article recounts the curious story of the sword that the artist and natural historian James Sowerby made from a celebrated meteorite discovered in southern Africa in the eighteenth century. The article throws interesting light on the life and preoccupations of a scientific devotee working with limited access to the frequent personal encounters and correspondence networks that cemented the world of elite science in early nineteenthcentury Britain. Although Sowerby was never a Fellow of the Royal Society, the sword (which Sowerby intended for presentation to the Emperor of Russia on the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814) attracted the attention of Sir Joseph Banks and others in the wake of the renewed scientific interest in meteorites as specimens of otherwise inaccessible matter existing beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The two remaining articles in the issue concern major figures whose places at the pinnacles of British science are beyond question. One, by Ruth Richardson and Bryan Rhodes, examines Joseph Lister’s first major abdominal operation, conducted in 1851 in his capacity as a house surgeon at University College Hospital, London, while he was still a medical student. The article, which points to Lister’s exemplary handling of the case of a woman with an eviscerating stab wound, complements the collection of essays that appeared, under the guest editorship of Brian Hurwitz and Marguerite Dupree, as our September 2013 issue.3 The other, by Neil Calver, presents a new perspective on the place of Peter Medawar among the twentieth century’s most distinguished communicators of science. Although Medawar’s admiration for the philosophy of Karl Popper is well known, there was more to his perception of Popper’s significance than has been commonly recognized. For Calver, Medawar’s Popper had as much to contribute to our understanding of the role of imagination in scientific enquiry as he did to problems related to the concept of falsification for which he is best known, especially among philosophers. In his analysis of Popper, as Calver shows, Medawar presented scientific enquiry as involving creative processes akin to, if not identical with, those of poets and artists. It is no coincidence that Medawar’s initial engagement with Popper’s work dates from the late 1950s, the high point of the ‘two cultures’ debate, given prominence by C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959. By the time that Medawar died, in 1987, he still had much to contribute to this and other aspects of the tending of the public face of science through insights that won the respect of scientists and non-scientists alike. Those who are concerned with such matters in our own day can only regret the silencing of a voice that would have injected a welcome mite of elegance and subtlety into the sometimes gross confrontations that surfaced in the culture wars of the 1990s and are still not entirely extinguished from discussions about the place of science in general literate culture in our own day. Robert Fox [email protected]
NOTES 1 2 3
‘Journals under threat: a joint response from history of science, technology and medicine editors’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 63, 1–3 (2009). Simon Schaffer, ‘Halley’s atheism and the end of the world’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 32, 17–40 (1977). Brian Hurwitz and Marguerite W. Dupree (guest editors), ‘Learning from Lister’, a special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society, vol. 67, no. 3 (September 2013).
