Making "Nature"
The History of a Scientific Journal
"Making 'Nature'" is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions. Now nearing its hundred and fiftieth year of publication, Nature is the international benchmark for scientific publication. Its contributors include Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, and Stephen Hawking, and it has published many of the most important discoveries in the history of science, including articles on the structure of DNA, the discovery of the neutron, the first cloning of a mammal, and the human genome.
But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In "Making 'Nature'", Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature's story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of "scientific community". Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist.
Contents:
Citations and Abbreviations: A Note to the Reader
Introduction: Who Is a "Scientist"?
Chapter One. Nature's Shifting Audience: 1869-1875
Chapter Two. Nature's Contributors and the Changing of Britain's Scientific Guard: 1872-1895
Chapter Three. Defining the "Man of Science" in Nature
Chapter Four. Scientific Internationalism and Scientific Nationalism
Chapter Five. Nature, Interwar Politics, and Intellectual Freedom
Chapter Six".It Almost Came Out on Its Own": Nature under L. J. F. Brimble and A. J. V. Gale
Chapter Seven. Nature, the Cold War, and the Rise of the United States
Chapter Eight".Disorderly Publication": Nature and Scientific Self-Policing in the 1980s
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Melinda Baldwin is a lecturer in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Reviews
We often think of scientific journals as receptacles for knowledge created elsewhere. But Baldwin shows that Nature, one of the premier journals in the world, was not a passive vessel, but rather a site where the rules of science themselves were debated and developed. Its pages were where scientists defined what it meant to do science: professionalization, peer review, science and internationalism, and the role of science in the public sphere. 'Making ' presents a powerful argument for the critical role of publishing in the creation of modern science – Matthew Stanley, New York University
Nature's journey from a relatively unsuccessful Victorian magazine aimed at the general public as much as scientific practitioners to its current position as the international benchmark for modern scientific publishing is one of the most important stories in the history of science. Melinda Baldwin tells it with aplomb, exploring the journal's shifts towards specialism and then internationalism, and focusing on the editors, from Norman Lockyer to John Maddox, whose distinctive personalities had such an impact on how Nature communicated, and indeed shaped, modern science. What is particularly impressive about 'Making ' is that it covers a period of more than a century and a half, from the 1860s to the present, while maintaining the same high levels of insight and expertise. As such, the book will be required reading for anybody interested in science and the media across the whole of the modern age – Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester
