Untangling Academic Publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research

In 2013, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded a 4-year project on the editorial and commercial history of the world’s oldest-surviving scholarly journal (‘Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: a social, cultural and economic history of a learned journal, 1665-2015’, AH/K001841). The project is led by Dr Aileen Fyfe at the University of St Andrews in partnership with the Royal Society. The project team convened a workshop at the Royal Society, 22 April 2016, on ‘The Politics of Academic Publishing, 1950-2016’. This briefing paper is informed by the contributions of those who attended that day, and we thank them for their insights. The authors of this briefing paper are a sub-group of those who attended the April 2016 workshop. This report is based upon the primary (historical) research of the Philosophical Transactions project team, combined with a literature review, and the expertise of the other authors (principally in higher education research, and in scholarly communication)