Proceedings and the Public: How a Commercial Genre Transformed Science

How did learned societies come to be closely associated with journal publishing and what were the consequences of this development? This chapter locates this shift in the emergence of “Proceedings” publications in the 1820s. Proceedings journals began as excerpts from commercial journals such as the Philosophical Magazine and they were initially seen as a form of broader public outreach. Gradually, however, societies sought to tame these new journals by establishing formal routines by which to decide what to publish, by setting up generic expectations regarding originality and style, and by encouraging the notion that certain journals were the only legitimate venues for original scientific claims. This was a structural transformation in the politics of knowledge that had far-reaching consequences for the basis of claims to scientific expertise. Following proceedings publications from their origins in attempts to diffuse science to their transformation into a preeminent form for specialized publishing shows that the rise of popular genres for communicating science has been important not simply because it allowed new social groups to participate in knowledge. These genres have sometimes been incorporated into elite science itself, reshaping elite institutions in the image of publics that they have sometimes sought to exclude.