The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century by Alex Csiszar (review)

Despite the recent upheaval in scholarly communication, the journal article remains the default mode of expression for scientific knowledge. In this wonderfully rich account of science publishing in the nineteenth century, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century, Alex Csiszar challenges the apparently natural relationship between science and the journal article. By tracing the history of this relationship, he argues, we can understand the continuing dominance of the journal, both in the sciences and the academy more widely.

The book addresses two key questions. Firstly, "how did so much epistemic weight come to be loaded into this one format over all others?" And secondly, "how did the public legitimacy of the scientific enterprise become so closely associated with the scientific literature?" (2). Through a sustained comparison of publishing practices in Britain and France, Csiszar examines the connection between knowledge production and publication medium. His focus is on the nineteenth century, but he situates this in a much longer history, looking to earlier periods for prior forms of serial publication and ahead to the way digital technologies have disrupted scientific publishing today. Throughout, his argument is that the interdependence of science and the scientific journal has a history, and over the course of his book he sets out the specific historical conditions that produced those features now considered characteristic of scientific publishing. Chapters address the connection between the press and scientific judgment; the link between scientific meetings and subsequent publication; authors and referees; discovery and property rights; what constituted a scientific paper; and how a science deemed identical with an accumulating archive of papers posed bibliographical challenges for those entrusted to maintain the scientific record. The book describes how the scientific journal began to take on its modern form in the nineteenth century; but by taking the journal as an object of study, Csiszar has much to tell us about science, its publics, and its increasing cultural authority in the period too.

The book's central argument is convincing, and by challenging the idea that the scientific journal sprang more or less fully formed with Henry Oldenburg and the Philosophical Transactions, Csiszar is able to produce a much richer account of scientific publishing. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is the way it contrasts the scientific memoir—large, expensive, associated with a scholarly society of some kind—with the scientific journal that not only displaced it but eventually came to be seen as the only appropriate form for the expression of scientific knowledge. Another strength is its comparative approach. Although the choice of nations is perhaps a little arbitrary—Csiszar accounts for it because he is interested in "the relationship between elite scientific institutions and the periodical press"—the contrasts he draws are illuminating, both demonstrating the distinct approaches to publication in each country and troubling the apparent universality of the journal form as it emerged (16). The research is superb, as Csiszar pursues the controversies around publishing from private correspondence and institutional archives to the printed publications themselves, and the methodological commitment to decentering the journal makes visible a whole host of other media formats and sites integral to scientific practice. Of particular significance here are the descriptions that Csiszar provides of how papers found their way into print, with all the attendant debates about the primacy of spoken or written versions and the attempts to establish which was authoritative. The attention to the circulation of separate copies, too, makes a major contribution to our understanding of scientific communication. Produced as soon as individual papers were sent to print, these were often available in advance of the journal itself and so constituted a private network of exchange. For authors, they provided a timely way to publicize their discoveries, and, as they consolidated relationships between scientists, could constitute their own economy...