The function of the scholarly organization: What is the Royal Society for?

What is the Royal Society for? Or, if it comes to that, what are the American Psychological Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, or even the British Medical Association actually for? We might as well start with the first such organization however. In its 1663 charter the Society is referred to as the “Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge” (Royal Society, 2006a). Its roots go much further back though, to scattered individual philosophers and scientists trying to make sense of the natural world and also trying to inform each other of their discoveries. In those early stages the only way to communicate at a distance was the laborious method of writing a letter in longhand, usually in Latin, and sending it by extremely costly and uncertain messenger services to other people that you happened to know might be interested. The only alternative was to risk letting your discoveries die with you (Gregor Mendel was, perhaps, the last scientist ever to go down the latter route). The fact that so many scientists went to the trouble and expense of communicating with each other in this cumbersome fashion shows how important they felt the dissemination of knowledge to be. From the very first, the Royal Society accepted the task both of communicating discoveries to members and of disseminating information to a wider audience. Its charter allowed it to publish, and it produced two books almost immediately – Evelyn's Sylva and Hooke's Micrographia, both, initially, at a considerable loss. The Philosophical Transactions, started informally by the secretary as a substitute for the circulated handwritten letter, is now the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the world.

Most other learned bodies have similar, if less august, backgrounds. They were started in order to bring like-minded individuals together and to facilitate scholars communicating ideas with each other, but also with a mission of disseminating information on their subject to a wider audience. Somewhere along the line however, a different turn was taken, as publishers persuaded the learned societies that there was money to be made from publishing, rather in the same way that psychiatry has been sidetracked by the money to be made by the pharmaceutical industry. Scientists and clinicians do not merely want to communicate their work to each other and to a wider audience, they are under enormous pressure to do so – virtually all their professional awards are based on publishing. Scientific publishing, as the late Robert Maxwell was among the first to realize, can be extraordinarily profitable, because, unlike almost all other industries, it is supply-led not demand-led. Most clinicians are desperate to get published, rather than desperate to find more published material to read. The Journal of Otherwise Unpublishable Single Case Studies in Psychiatry might, perhaps, build up a world-wide circulation of 250, at a library subscription rate of £1,000 pa (both quite normal figures in the industry). This means a net budget of a quarter of a million pounds. The editor has to produce the equivalent of four small paperback books a year, but the publisher does not have to bear the cost of marketing each one as a separate paperback or the uncertainty of knowing how many each will sell, and the contributors, reviewers, proof-readers and editors will all work for next to nothing. On top of this, now, comes electronic access. The publisher can receive the content free in an electronic form from the contributors and can then charge their libraries extra to get it back again (I say libraries, because there will be hardly any individual subscribers. Virtually all of this money will come from public university or health service budgets). It is, of course, traditional to knock publishers for profiteering (see Byron c. 1814) but even they are beginning to realize that the gravy train cannot continue indefinitely in its present form, and are making the characteristic response of starting new journals to discuss the problem and asking libraries to subscribe to them (see for example Emerald, 2006). In the past 20 years the price of scientific journals has risen by 300%over the notional inflation rate, with Reed Elsevier being the most notorious offender (European Union, 2006). The EU report has at long last recommended that researchers who receive EU funding should be mandated to give free-to-end-user open access to their resulting publications – an idea succinctly branded as “daft” by the chief executive of Reed Elsevier, Sir Crispin Davies (Guardian, 2006), and only very reluctantly accepted under pressure from the funding councils and the Wellcome Trust (CILIP, 2006).

Publications, and especially, learned journals, are currently substantial money-spinners. In the year to 31 March 2004 the Royal Society received an income from publications of just over three and a half million pounds for an expenditure of approximately three million (Royal Society, 2006b). Half a million on a turnover of three and a half is pretty good going even by most business standards, let alone by the standards of an organization whose mission statement focuses on “sharing scientific knowledge” and “giving the public a voice”. In effect, public money from library budgets is contributing to fund the other, undoubtedly extremely worthy, activities of the society. The danger is that the task of income raising will come to predominate over any other organizational mission. Anyone who was party to the recent negotiations with the BMJ Publishing Group regarding online access to their journals for National Health Service staff would be open to some doubts as to whether the British Medical Association's dedication to the capitalist ethos was outweighing its dedication to having informed health professionals.

It has to be noted, of course, that one of the major worthy activities of the Royal Society is keeping up its Grade 1 listed building overlooking St James' Park. This is a much grander address than most learned bodies can boast, but even the Royal College of Psychiatrists can manage an embassy-sized building in Belgravia, with crystal chandeliers, and the British Psychological Society a substantial, if less elegant, block in Leicester. More recent scholarly groupings and pressure groups have less need for expenditure on this grandiose scale because, of course, they exist to a far greater extent in an electronic form. Anyone now setting up a mental health pressure group or discussion forum would be better advised to hire a good web editor than to look for a distinguished address or to found a specialist journal.

Just as the invention of the printed journal wiped out the expensive circulated hand-written letter, so the information revolution of the last few years has the capacity to wipe out the expensive printed journal. Psychotherapy is more slow-moving, but in fields such as, say, molecular genetics, scientific change is now so rapid that no printed journal can keep up. Researchers in the field cheerfully admit that their actual form of communication with each other is by e-mail circular. The printed journals exist because professional rewards come from having published in them, not because researchers are likely to read them. In the process they form a historical archive of the subject, and, incidentally, make a profit for the publishers. Information has always been a commodity. In fact, in many ways it has been the commodity, with a scarcity value. When, some twelve years ago, the London Psychology Librarians Committee wrote to the American Psychological Association querying the very high price charged for access to the PSYCINFO data-base, the reply made no mention of any mission of their association to educate and inform, but baldly said “The PSYCINFO data-base is a major source of funding for the APA”. A generation is growing up, however, for whom information is a given, rather than a commodity. For them, the fact that practitioners want to make their research public, but are inhibited from doing so by external commercially-imposed high prices will, within a few years, make no sense at all. Anyone who has dealings with 15-year-olds will have realized that they have developed ways of communicating with like-minded peers around the world that exist more or less outside the capitalist system and the nation state. If the learned societies really aim at, in the words of the Royal Society's mission, “sharing scientific knowledge” then they should be seizing the opportunity to move towards free publication through open access journals, on-line wikkis etc, rather than desperately trying to keep up their income streams. This does mean, of course, that the funding for those other activities would have to fall or be made more transparent.

The emphasis nowadays is both on evidence-based medicine and on experiential knowledge (Roe & Davidson, 2005). Clinicians have to accept that service users already have access to a wide range of free information, much of it, unfortunately, biased or unreliable. The day of the ignorant and submissive patient is over, but the “informed client” is just as likely, at present, to be misinformed. Our professional organizations should therefore be trying to ensure that all practitioners have access to the evidence and that service users have access to reliable guidance, rather than contining to hoard or sell information.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Sonya Lipczynska and Emily Jeremiah for comments on drafts of this editorial.