Searchguide – BTH English

Conditions for scientific communication have truly changed through past centuries, but still the most basic form of communication – the personal contact (e.g. via e-mail) – is the most valuable. But also meetings and conferences are appreciated forms of communication that have lasted through centuries.

The date of the first scientific publication can not be established exactly, but we know that there was such publication a thousand years ago in Persia and China. Most often though, you might think about the classical Greek philosophers and scholars like Plato and Aristotle among others, who 300 B.C. gathered disciples and masters in the Academy to converse and spread knowledge about the nature of things.

During the Middle Ages learned men focused on collecting and passing on ancient knowledge and traditions, among which the classical Greek belonged. During the Middle Ages translations from Arabic and Greek to Hebrew and Latin became so common that new professions were formed to distribute and in other ways handle these documents – printers, book sellers, publishers and librarians – the last mentioned worked at the medieval universities, systemizing and organizing all the manuscripts that poured in from writer’s of encyclopedias and translators.

With the Renaissance you could say that modern science as we know it emerged. The scientific revolution of the renaissance meant so much more than copying down and gathering existing knowledge. The renaissance scholar broke all scholastic chains and was a jack of all trades, and an experimenting man who produced great amounts of knowledge which did not fit into the existing system. Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon are two well-known names from this time.

Scientific societies

The approach of looking forward rather that backwards demanded new quicker methods for communication, and at the beginning of the 17th century the first scientific society was formed in Italy. Accademia dei Lincei was founded in Rome and the society’s research results and experiments were related in the publication “Gesta Lyceorum”. The most famous scientific society in the world “The Royal Society” of London was formed in the middle of the 17th century when scholars met spontaneously to discuss their research. The society was finally formalized when Charles II issued a charter in 1662.

Philosophical Transactions

Today the journal of the Royal Society “Philosophical Transactions” is the oldest scientific journal still published. During the second part of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, private libraries became more common and with that books also became an accepted form of communication for scientists.

Specialized societies

During the 18th century specialized societies began to emerge and several museums of natural history were founded. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739, in 1753 The British museum was founded, as well as The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and in 1786 The Swedish Academy.

Specialized journals

During the 1770s several specialized journals were created in medicine, chemistry, botany and mathematics. The exchange of abstracts became an appreciated way of managing scientific communication, but was also seen as a sign of a fundamental problem in science that had now appeared. Toward the end of the 18th century there were complaints about the enormous growth of scientific literature, of the difficulty of determining the contents of a book or article only through the title, poor scientific quality and the difficulty of finding source material. Complaints which have lasted over the years!

Applied science and engineering and modern industrial development dominate during the 19th century which was also the golden decade of patents. Abstracts and indexing become well established.

20th century –

Among the events and trends which have affected scientific communication the most during the 20th century are the establishment of multinational companies, the appearance of Government research institutes and institutions: Big Science with their teams and collaboration between institutions, increased specializations, increasing processing-speed and storage capacity of computers for filing, analyzing or searching and presenting data. English is established as the dominating scientific language, International organizations increase international cooperation and there are fifty times more publications in science and technology than during all previous centuries together.

Personal contact

Conditions for scientific communication have truly changed through past centuries, but still the most basic form of communication – the personal contact (e.g. via e-mail) – is the most valuable. But also meetings and conferences are appreciated forms of communication that have lasted through centuries. Secondary literature continues to be an important source of information since primary literature is published at such a breakneck speed that no scientist can absorb the news in his subject field fully, which, as we have seen, has been a fact since the 18th century.

Free access

An increasing number of scientific documents are freely available on the web today. The reason for this is above all the traditional scientific publishing model which is based on Government financed scientists providing commercial publishers with free material. These publishers then hire reviewers and editors from the scientific community to filter the article material which is published in journals which Government financed libraries purchase and whose readers are the same circle of people as the authors, reviewers and editors of the article in this example. This system has worked during the last two centuries mainly for two reasons: qualification and news circulation.

Protest against unreasonable price increase

Toward the end of the last century an unreasonable price increase for scientific journals began to lead to loud protests from both libraries and scientists. Examples of price increases of up to 4 times of consumer price index were not uncommon. These conditions made both scientists and libraries react; libraries by canceling subscriptions and starting to build their own database-archives for scientific material, and scientists by publishing articles in these archives, plus starting their own scientific journals which made articles freely accessible on the Internet. The development of the Internet and the WWW has accelerated the paradigmatic shift in scientific publishing.

Today many voices can be heard demanding open access to scientific articles. Early 2010 the swedish Research Council proclaimed that they in the future will only finance researcher who publish the funded results oopen access. Earlier on the European research council have recommended open access and even on a national government level you can today hear discussions about mandating open access for scientific research financed by the state.

Peter Linde
2010-09-06