Tradition and protean nature-journals and scholarly communication: a review essay.(JSTOR: A History)("Devant le Deluge" and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication)(Book review)

JSTOR: A History. By Roger C. Schonfeld. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxiv, 412 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-691-11531-1.

"Devant le Deluge" and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication. By David A. Kronick. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004. iii-x, 335 pp. $54.95. ISBN 0-8108-5003-6.

Since the advent of scholarly publishing many years ago scholars have relied upon the existence of rationalized venues for their scientific research and scholarship. Indeed, professional life, if not existence, may well depend upon a foundation free of destructive intrusion or philistine interests. As libraries have attempted to cope with rising costs of serials and library service, journals have seen massive increases in costs along a long spectrum of economic measurement. Stresses and concerted attempts at keeping the economic whirlwinds from blowing away the temple of knowledge have left many libraries holding their own, only to wonder within the inner sanctum what remains to be seen. Not long ago a masterful and deeply committed attempt to meet at least some of academe's needs led to a rebirth, in nearly Alexandrine terms, of scholarship, at least as it manifested itself in journal form. Many journals have inhabited the shelving ranges of many libraries only to be lost, in a purely illusory sense. Dusty and lost to memory, titles such as Mind and the American Historical Review were relegated to a shadow life on shelves and in library facilities not often visited.

Today such is no longer the case--and for very excellent reasons. If the above scenario is a little overdrawn, it remains closer to the truth than not. As JSTOR has grown in use and more titles have been added at specific intervals, the richly layered database functions essentially as an Internet universe of peer-reviewed--thus, in Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, sanctified--journals. (1) Scholarly sanctification alone does not offer perennial existence, intellectual respectability, or use, but it does speak to the power of electronic archival storage and philosophy of access. Were it not for the dream and courage of scholarly visionaries, the slowly dust-ridden existence, no matter how neglected, would be another less than elegant story. In JSTOR: A History Roger C. Schonfeld, on staff at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers a systematic and well-articulated narrative recounting early musings over storage, electronic archival possibilities, economic necessity, and entrepreneurship. Schonfeld traces the historical events surrounding and animating the evolution of JSTOR, institutionally and economically, drawing upon internal resources. Tables and narrative replete with illustrative details and examples frame an essentially administrative account of an entrepreneurial venture under academic institutional conditions. Successfully and at times delicately handled permutations and negotiations make this account useful.

The primary mover of JSTOR as a venture was William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University, who has contributed mightily to concerns of higher education in the United States. Schonfeld begins his narrative with the initial purpose of JSTOR meeting the needs of storage and the necessity of addressing institutional cost attendant to library and storage construction. Indeed, infrastructure was very much in evidence, and JSTOR satisfied the need to obviate further investment in physical facilities and planning. The narrative continues with a discussion of the inner deliberations, concerns, and objectives of JSTOR. Schonfeld offers a history firmly based in the rich primary sources of the major actors and the foundation in question. The final triumph and success of JSTOR diverge from the original intention of storage to the phenomenon of scholarly dissemination of knowledge. JSTOR's nonprofit profile and its essential importance to academia are delineated with a reasoned approach and interest.

Scholarly and scientific research culture manifests itself within the printed page, whether electronically delivered or in movable type. JSTOR offers added value to the scholarly communication stream by resuscitating the very vehicles by which ideas and concepts as well as memory flow. Without undue exaggeration, the long sleep of journals can now find a renewed intellectual life and purpose both as historically grounded knowledge and for invigorating current thoughts and trends in contemporary research.

Evolutionary History

Journals, especially scientific and scholarly journals, evolved in the seventeenth century when a need arose to rationalize communication among those individuals who required contact with kindred minds. In a period of European history fraught with political and religious concerns and turmoil, scientists and humanists embarked upon a path that led to a many-faceted highway of communication. Presently, scholarly communication has grown into many avenues and arterial routes, servicing a landscape capable of disseminating a large spectrum of information and knowledge. (2) It would be unimaginable that such would be otherwise. In the nascent years of scholarly journal gestation scientists and other scholars looked to a stream of communication that could not only enhance communication of findings, discussion, and reasonable assurance of credibility and seriousness of endeavor but also provide a way to establish institutional identity, if not professional association. Institutional support and the interest and power of forces external to the collectivity of scientists and scholars made for the survival and success of the two earliest scholarly publications, Journal des Savants and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. (3)

As sophistication of organized scientific enterprise evolved, so too did the journal.

The need for organs capable of serving as conduits and sounding boards for otherwise isolated individuals resulted in the founding of societies, not only professional and scholarly but also official and--as Pierre Bourdieu would wager--sanctified journals representing what may be construed as accepted knowledge, information, and wisdom. Journals capable of maintaining the conveyance of a discipline's activities or knowledge dissemination were and are paramount to maintaining professional and scholarly vitality and purpose. Beyond the normative operation of the journal as conveyance, scholarly communication is predicated upon the acculturative properties inherent in the practice of research and dissemination of those efforts. (4) Evolution of scholarly practices and knowledge verification, argumentation, and consensus-driven protocols leading to theory, knowledge generation, and future effort illustrate the gravitas represented and exerted by the presence of journals.

JSTOR has burgeoned into such a global enterprise that its offerings can be available to users in various locales and institutions. In a real sense, temporal and spatial considerations evaporate or become negligible. Global or at least national scholarship assumes a larger profile in importance. Indeed, for a scientific, a humanities, or a social science journal, JSTOR offers both breadth and depth, transcending the bibliographic and structural limits formerly imposed by time and space. Most exceptional still is the reappearance of journal articles formerly less utilized, adding a further dimension to the researcher's portfolio. Perhaps the most important result of electronic journal delivery is the possibilities it offers for the systematic study of journals as scholarly communication artifacts as well as intellectual phenomena. To this end, an examination of the possibilities for JSTOR as a rich storehouse of knowledge, information, and even data should illustrate the obvious scholarly communication possibilities therein.

Bibliometric Examination and Scholarly Communication

A promising approach to establishing a scholarly communication study is to examine the richly layered JSTOR database. Without exaggerating library science's pioneering approach to examination of knowledge, bibliometrics has proved to be a salient approach to ferreting out information, formerly hidden from obvious view. (5) Among the groupings of journals under various recognizable titles respective to disciplinary formation and subdisciplinary interest and specialization exists a wealth of articles devoted to some permutation of bibliometrics. Whether recognizable as such or not, these articles furnish discrete studies devoted to some aspect of scholarly communication in the main, touching a given aspect of journal evolution or intellectual orientation. A powerful repository of actively accessed articles representing various humanities, social sciences, and scientific journals permits a mapping of the intellectual topography of journal research and activity.

Archaeologically rich, a bibliometric appreciation of scholarly communication awaits the library historian specializing in the history of journals, scholarly communication in general, or the exploration and discovery of scholarly trends and evolution. (6) Schools of thought and the discernment of methodological trends and uses of specific techniques can be found within the corpus of articles in JSTOR. From biological research to geographical studies, to history of science or the nature of scholarship devoted to John Donne's poetry, JSTOR represents nearly unlimited possibilities for bibliometric examination. Most critically, from the bibliometric perspective, articles utilizing bibliometric techniques to some degree can be isolated, identified, and mapped for their significance to understanding the mechanism(s) of scholarly communication. Entire trends in research agendas promulgated by a given journal can be mapped for in-depth analysis.

A profile of bibliometric objectives can reveal authorship studies of articles, institutional affiliation, methodologies used by those authors, and types and number of references used in scholarly apparatus and argumentation. Moreover, trends in groupings of authors and respective concentrations of subjects can be tied to various other bibliometric conditions and characteristics revealed by closer examination of JSTOR articles. (7) As illustration, an examination of a sample of articles exclusively devoted to scholarly communication should frame the importance of JSTOR as a database of journal articles that directly lay claim to studying the very phenomenon of journal activity. As JSTOR represents a veritable listing of mainstream disciplinary journals, articles identified with some permutation of bibliometric analysis will offer additional verification of the necessity of library science methodology embedded within disciplinary cultures. Additionally, articles can be triaged from samples searched in JSTOR for articles containing a bibliometric perspective or methodology. When examined, characteristics of articles could be generally placed under specific rubrics for a greater appreciation of bibliometric studies appearing in JSTOR. A random selection of such articles revealed that sociologically oriented articles, especially clearly identified as sociology research and published in sociology journals, revealed a pronounced interest in examining research literature. (8) Professional journals can form the basis for studies examining intellectual orientations, changes in those orientations, research and methodological trends, as well as future directions in disciplinary research agendas. (9) As journals constitute organic evolution of disciplinary activity, examinations of journals as subjects of sustained research offer critically useful and…