Abstract Summary
For more than two hundred years after the origin of the learned journal, the modes of scholarly communication remained highly diverse. Only in the later nineteenth century did the scientific paper achieve privileged status. It took another half century before the formats and uses of scientific journals began to fully correspond to contemporary conceptions of scientific publishing. Those journals, “invented” after World War II by commercial publishers rather than scientific societies, had specialized orientations, international editorial boards, established peer-review procedures and relatively fast publication schedules. Due to these features, they were more apt than their forebears to provide analysis of scientific fields and developments, direct those developments through categorization and selection, bring about social cohesion, and negotiate meanings and social rules. As scholars have only recently begun to approach questions regarding the nature and legitimacy of science from the perspective of changing communication formats, the (twentieth-century) scientific journal has not yet received much attention as a social institution. By presenting the case study of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA), founded in 1946 at Elsevier, this paper probes into the role of international journals in epistemic, political and community-building processes in postwar science. It also explores the role of commemorative practices in the performance of journals as social institutions, specifically the 1000th volume of BBA, published in 1989 as a celebration volume with reprints of “particularly significant articles”. This paper argues that journals sometimes invoked the commemorated past to serve conceptual, institutional, social, and political agendas in the commemorating present.
