Cameron Neylon

*[![goods](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/goods-300x204.jpg){.alignleft
.size-medium .wp-image-19303 decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="300"
height="204"
srcset="https://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/goods-300x204.jpg 300w, https://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/goods.jpg 703w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/goods.jpg)This
is an approximate rendering of my comments as part of the closing panel
of "[The End of Scientific Journal? Transformations in
Publishing](https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/11/transformations-in-publishing/)"
held at the Royal Society, London on 27 November 2015. It should be read
as a reconstruction of what I might have said rather than an accurate
record. The day had focussed on historical accounts of "journals" as
mediators of both professional and popular research communications. A
note of the meeting will be published. Our panel was set the question of
"will the journal still exist in 2035".*

Over the course of 2015 I've greatly enjoyed being part of the series of
meetings looking at the history of research communications and
scientific journals in the past. In many cases we've discovered that our
modern concerns, today the engagement of the wider public, the challenge
of expertise, are not at all new, that many of the same issues were
discussed at length in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And then there
are moments of whiplash as something incomprehensible streaks past:
[Pietro
Corsi](http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/corsi/index.html)
telling us that dictionaries were published as periodicals; [Aileen
Fyfe](https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/da/persons/aileen-fyfe%2859c3c852-a83d-497c-a5a6-2d3a0b045857%29.html)
explaining that while papers given to at Royal Society meetings were
then refereed, the authors could make only make "verbal" not
intellectual changes to the text in response; [Jon
Topham](http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20042/464/jonathan_topham)
telling us that chemistry and physics were characterised under
literature in the journals of the early 19th century.

So if we are to answer the exam question we need to address the charge
that [Vanessa
Heggie](http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/applied-health/heggie-vanessa.aspx)
gave us in the first panel discussion. What has remained the same? And
what has changed? If we are to learn from history then we need to hold
ourselves to a high standard in trying to understand what it is (not)
telling us. Prediction is always difficult, especially about the
future...but it wasn't [Niels
Bohr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr "Niels Bohr"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"} who first said that. A Dane would
likely tell us that "det er svÃ¦rt at spÃ¥, isÃ¦r om fremtiden" is a
quote from Storm Peterson or perhaps [Piet
Hein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_%28scientist%29 "Piet Hein (scientist)"){.zem_slink
target="_blank" rel="wikipedia"}, [but it probably has deeper
roots](http://chaosbook.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/lundskovdk-citater.html).
It's easy to tell ourselves compelling stories, whether they say that
"everything has changed" or that "it's always been that way", but
actually checking and understanding the history matters.

So what has stayed the same? We've heard throughout today the importance
of groups, communities. Of authors, of those who were (or were trying to
be) amongst the small group of paid professors at UK universities. Of
the distinctions between communities of amateurs and of professionals.
We've heard about language communities, of the importance of who you
know in being read at the Royal Society and of the development of
journals as a means of creating research disciplines. I think this
centrality of communities, of groups, of *clubs* is a strand that links
us to the 19th century. And I think that's true because of the nature of
knowledge itself.

Knowledge is a slippery concept, and [I've made the argument
elsewhere](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/the-limits-on-open-why-knowledge-is-not-a-public-good-and-what-to-do-about-it/),
so for now I'll just assert that it belongs in the bottom right quadrant
of [Ostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom)'s
categorisation of goods. Knowledge is non-rivalrous â€" if I give it to
you I still have it â€" but also excludable â€" I can easily prevent you
from having it, by not telling you, or by locking it up behind a
paywall, or simply behind impenetrable jargon. This is interesting
because [Buchannan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan)'s
work on [the economics of
clubs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good) show us that it is
precisely the goods in this quadrant which are used to sustain clubs and
make them viable.

The survival of journals, or of scholarly societies, disciplines or
communities, therefore depends on how they deploy knowledge as a *club
good.* To achieve this deployment it is necessary to make that
knowledge, the club good, less exclusive, and more public. What is nice
about this view is that it allows us, to borrow Aileen Fyfe's language,
to talk about "public-making" ([Jan
Velterop](http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/) has used the [old
term](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/publicate) "publicate" in a similar
way) as an activity which includes public engagement, translation, and
â€" to [Rebekah
Higgitt](https://www.kent.ac.uk/history/staff/profiles/higgitt.html)'s
point â€" education as well as scholarly publishing as we traditionally
understand it as overlapping subsets of this broader activity.

But what has changed? I would argue that the largest change in the 20th
century was one of scale. The massive increase in the scale and
globalisation of the research enterprise, as well as the rise of
literacy meant that traditional modes of coordination, within scholarly
societies and communities, and beyond to interested publics were
breaking down. To address this coordination problem we took knowledge as
a club good and privatised it, introducing copyright and intellectual
property as a means of engaging corporate interests to manage the
coordination problem for us. It is not an accident that the scale up,
the introduction of copyright and IP to scholarly publishing, and
scholarly publishing becoming (for the first time) profitable all
co-incide. The irony of this, is that by creating larger, and clearly
defined markets, we solved the problem of market scale that troubledÂ 
early journals that needed to find both popular and expert audiences, by
locking wider publics out.

The internet and the web also changed everything, but its not the cost
of reproduction that most matters. The critical change for our purpose
here is the change in the economics of discovery. As part of our
privatisation of knowledge we parcelled it up into journals, an
industrial broadcast mechanism in which one person aims with as much
precision as possible to reach the right, expert, audience. The web
shifts the economics of discovering expertise in a way that makes it
viable to discover, not the expert who knows everything about a subject,
but the person who just happens to have *the right* piece of knowledge
to solve a specific problem.

These two trends are pulling us in opposite directions. The industrial
model means creating specialisation and labelling. The creation of
communities and niches that are, for publishers, markets that can be
addressed individually. These communities are defined by credentialling
and validation of deep expertise in a given subject. The ideas of
micro-expertise, of a person with no credentials having the key
information or insight radically undermines the traditional dynamics of
scholarly group formation. I don't think it is an accident that those
scholarly communities that [MichÃ¨le
Lamont](http://scholar.harvard.edu/lamont/home) identifies as having the
most stable self conception have a tendency to being the most
traditional in terms of their communication and public engagement.
Lamont identifies history (but not as [Berris
Charnley](http://berrischarnley.com/) reminded me the radicals from the
history of science here today!) and (North American analytical)
philosophy in this group. I might add synthetic chemistry from my own
experience as examples.

It is perhaps indicative of the degree of siloing that I'm a trained
biochemist at a history conference, telling you about economics â€" two
things I can't claim any deep expertise in â€" and last week I gave a
talk from a cultural theory perspective. I am merrily skipping across
the surface of these disciplines, dipping in a little to pull out
interesting connections *and no-one has called me on it\*.* You are
being forced, both by the format of this panel, and the information
environment we inhabit, to assess my claims not based on my PhD thesis
topic or my status or position, but on how productively my claims and
ideas are clashing with yours. We discover each other, not through the
silos of our disciplinary clubs and journals, but through the networked
affordances that connect me to you, that in this case we could trace
explicitly via Berris Charnley and [Sally
Shuttleworth](http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/about-faculty/faculty-members/victorian-period/shuttleworth-professor-sally).
That sounds to me rather more like the 19th century world we've been
hearing about today than the 20th century one that our present
disciplinary cultures evolved in.

This restructuring of the economics of discovery has profound
implications for our understanding of expertise. And it is our cultures
of expertise that form the boundaries of our groups â€" our knowledge
clubs â€" whether they be research groups, disciplines, journals,
discussion meetings or scholarly societies. The web shifts our
understanding of public-making. It shifts from the need to define and
target the expert audience through broadcast â€" a one-to-audience
interaction â€" to a many-to-many environent in which we aim to connect
with the right person to discover the right contribution. The importance
of the groups remains. The means by which they can, and should want to
communicate has changed radically.

The challenge lies, not in giving up on our ideas of expertise, but in
identifying how we can create groups that both develop shared
understanding that enables effective and efficient communication
internally but are also open to external contributions. It is not that
defining group boundaries doesn't matter, it is crucial, but that the
shape and porosity of those boundaries needs to change. Journals have
played a role throughout their history in creating groups, defining
boundaries, and validating membership. That role remains important, it
is just that the groups, and their cultures, will need to change to
compete and survive.

We started 2015 with the idea that the journal was invented in 1665.
This morning we heard from Jon Topham that the name was first used in
the early 19th century, but for something that doesn't look much like
what we would call a journal today. I believe in 20 years we will still
have things called journals, and they will be the means of mediating
communications between groups, including professional scholars and
interested publics. They'll look very different from what we have today
but their central function, of mediating and expressing identity for
groups will remain.

\* *This is not quite true. [Martin Eve](https://www.martineve.com/) has
called me on skipping too lightly across the language of a set of
theoretical frameworks from the humanities without doing sufficient work
to completely understand them. I don't think it is co-incidental that
Martin is a cultural and literary scholar who also happens to be a
technologist, computer programmer and deeply interested in policy design
and implementation, as well as the intersection of symbolic and
financial economies.*


<em>
 This is an approximate rendering of my comments as part of the closing panel of “The End of Scientific Journal? Transformations in Publishing” held at the Royal Society, London on 27 November 2015. It should be read as a reconstruction of what I might have said rather than an accurate record. The day had focussed on historical accounts of “journals” as mediators of both professional and popular research communications.
</em>

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

The end of the journal? What has changed, what stayed the same?