The document discusses the emergence of learned societies and their role in developing public knowledge. It describes how learned societies evolved from secret Renaissance academies into open institutions that helped formalize knowledge exchange across borders through journals and inter-organizational links. Key developments included the transition from alchemy to experimental science with the Royal Society of London, the development of peer review and intellectual property concepts, and learned societies taking on civic functions to disseminate and standardize knowledge for the public.

1. Learned Societies as ‘Knowledge
Cultures’: Emerging Public
Knowledge Ecologies
Michael A. Peters
with Tina Besley
University of Waikato

2. Frontispiece of Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal-
Society, engraved by Wenceslaus Hellar in 1667.
Source: National Portrait Gallery (UK)

3. The frontispiece
 The frontispiece by Wenceslaus Hollar, after John Evelyn 1667, to
The History of the Royal-Society of London (1667) by Thomas
Sprat is a prime example of legitmation of a certain Baconian view
of science.
 It shows three figures: William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker,
King Charles II, and Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban. The bust of
Charles II, the Society's first patron is being crowned by a
symbolical figure representing Fame. Viscount Brouncker, the first
president (left) points to the inscription. Francis Bacon, (Viscount
St. Alban), is located to the right. At Bacon's feet is the legend
‘Artium Instaurator’, reminding us of his Instauratio Magma.

4. History of the Royal-Society
 “Sprat's History of the Royal-Society appeared in 1667,
only five years after the fledgling Society was granted its
Royal Charter and appointed its first President. Since
there had not been much time for progress, Sprat
concentrated on making grandiose claims for the future.
To reinforce his message of Baconian improvement,
Sprat included this engraving, even though it was too big
to fit in his book without folding. Originally in a slightly
different version, it had probably been designed as a
broadsheet in the campaign to advertise the Royal
Society and ‘to devise all wayes to revive Lord Bacons
lustre.’”
 Patricia Fara (2003)

5. Interpretation
 In this allegorical picture, Charles II is being crowned with a laurel wreath
by the winged Goddess of Fame, immediately identifiable by her trumpet.
Above his head hangs the Society's coat of arms, with its motto Nullius in
verba – take nothing on authority – and behind the President's back lies
the Society's large ornate mace, made of silver and a gift from the King.
Diplomatically, Charles has been given the most prominent position in the
hope of securing further royal patronage, preferably in the form of financial
support (his generosity was mainly restricted to supplying his Society with
venison for anniversary meetings). To demonstrate the Fellows' Baconian
faith in experiment, the elegant arches are adorned with measuring
instruments and in the background lie two of the Royal Society's crowning
achievements, a giant telescope and the airpump designed by the
aristocratic chemist, Robert Boyle.

6. Interpretation
 Elevated on his pillar, Charles is flanked by two figureheads who
are identified but not named by the Latin words at their feet – the
President and the Instaurator of the Arts (a more colloquial but
anachronistic translation might be Promoter of Practical Science).
This is a symbolic President: nominated by the King and here
representing the Fellows of the Royal Society, his personal identity
is irrelevant. He is timelessly draped in semi-classical attire, but
the Society's ideological leader, Francis Bacon, is dressed in his
old-fashioned Lord Chancellor's robes in the hope of attracting
young lawyers to join the Society. The living President's gesture
emphasizes the royal patron's importance, whereas Bacon is a
guide from the past who indicates that instruments are the true
source of knowledge.

7. Bacon’s Political Vision of
Science
 “The fons et origo of this discussion is Francis Bacon’s vision of a political order in
which the class of scientists is given power by an enlightened ruler in his House of
Solomon in “The New Atlantis” ([1627]1882 v.5: 347-413). This vision had a
practical effect on the attempts by the Royal Society in London to distinguished
itself by its methodological practices and internal governance as a type of political
body in relation to the crown (Sprat [1667]1958: 321-438; Lynch 2001: 177-96;
Shapin 1994), and to do the same with parallel institutions elsewhere in Europe
(Hahn 1971: 1-34; Gillispie 2004). The Victorians made sure that Bacon would be
best known for his ideas about induction as a method (cf. Peltonen 1996: 321-24)
and, as his major German expositor put it, “how his whole nature was, in every
way, instinctively opposed to verbal discussions” (Fischer 1857: 307). But Bacon’s
extensive body of writings included not only writings on method, but also on
“counsellors” to the crown, or experts, on the merits of republics, on the nature of
political authority, on the proper internal organization of science, on funding and
authority over science, and on collective research.”

8. Thomas Sprat (1667: 47)
History the Royal Society
“How few secrets have there been that have
been long conceal'd from the whole World by
their Authors? . . . There is no question at all,
but all, or the greatest part [of them] will soon
flow into this public Treasure.”
Emerging themes of openness and public(ness) of knowledge and
science; openness and secrecy; concepts of knowledge and
property with the development of copyright and patents

9. Thomas Jefferson, 1813
“He who receives an idea from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening mine; as
he who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without lessening mine.”
Thomas Jefferson letter to Isaac Mcpherson, August 13, 1813, reprinted in H. A. Washington, ed., Writings
of Thomas Jefferson 1790-1826, vol. 6 (Washington, D. C: Taylor & Maury, 1854), 180-81; quoted in
Graham v. John Deere Company of Kansas, 383 U. S. 1, 8-9n.2 (1966).
Theme of openness in relation to the ‘economy of ideas,’ ‘economics
of abundance’, knowledge exchange and development, the
‘learning economy’

10. John Wesley Powell, 1886
 “Possession of property is exclusive; possession of knowledge is not
exclusive; for the knowledge which one man has may also be the possession
of another. The learning of one man does not subtract from the learning of
another, as if there were to be a limited quantity to be divided into exclusive
holdings; so discovery by one man does not inhibit discovery by another as if
there were a limited quantity of unknown truth; scholarship breeds
scholarship, wisdom breeds wisdom, discovery breeds discovery…The laws of
political economy that relate to property do not belong to the economics of
science and intellectual progress. While ownership of property precludes
other ownership of the same, ownership of knowledge promotes other
ownership of the same, and when research is properly organized every man’s
work is an aid to every other man’s.”
 “(6) All Government research stimulates, promotes and guides private research,” Organizations of Certain Bureaus,
Congressional Edition, Vol. 2345, (p. 1082), 1st session of 49th Congress, 1886
 Letter from the Director of Geological Survey, J.W. Powell, (pp.1070-84), Department of Interior, Washington D.C.

11. Orientation
This paper theorizes learned societies as “knowledge cultures” to enable a better
historical understanding of the emergence of a network of knowledge
institutions (the modern university, the research library, the museum, the
laboratory) that came into existence
(i) through and in relation to changing concepts of freedom, openness and
scientific creativity involving the complex emergence of copyright and the
history of intellectual property law
(ii) through the process of peer production and governance of knowledge based
on journal systems
(iii) through the move from closed, secret societies to open learned societies
exemplified in the shift from alchemy to experimental science
It provides a focus on the Royal Society based on the inspiration of Francis Bacon
and links to the public nature of science with the aim of demonstrating the role
and contribution of scientific learned societies to a contemporary
understanding of science as a global public good.

12. Aims
1. The paper provides a brief speculative history of the
learned society, its enduring organization, and its
theoretical relationship to the contemporary political
economy of the knowledge economy;
2. reviews claims for new principles of knowledge
organization based on emerging public knowledge
ecologies and considers the strategic knowledge
development of learned societies in the in the context of
the digital age.

13. The Scholarly Societies
Project
 There are some 4,157 learned societies with 3,832 associated
websites.
 The oldest learned societies, some thirty of them, were established
in the period 1323-1599 overwhelmingly in Italy (19 of 30), but also
in France, England, Ireland, Scotland and Spain.
 The oldest academy in Europe was established in 1323 seven
wealthy men, “les sept Troubadours”, brought together poets
writing in the langue d'Oc, to found Compagnie du Gai Sçavoir.
Under Louis XIV, it became Académie des Jeux Floraux (Academy
of Floral Games)

14. European Development
 In the period 1600 to 1699 a further 43
societies were established again predominantly
in Europe (mostly Italy) with some societies
being founded in Germany. During this period
the Royal Society of London was established
(1660) and the establishment of national
science academies followed soon after.

15. Renaissance Humanism
James E. McClelland (2002)
 “The organizational and institutional character of eighteenth-century
learned societies developed from Renaissance antecedents and the
humanist movement. By the fifteenth century, Renaissance
humanism began to take on significant organizational and
institutional dimensions, and hundreds of literary and fine arts
societies sprang up outside the universities, wherever educated
people gathered. Ficino’s Accademia Platonica, founded in Florence
in 1442, is sometimes pointed to as the first of this new type of
organization, although Michele Maylender signals the Accademia
Aldina (1495), associated with the Aldine press, as the first formal
‘Renaissance’ academy.”

16. Learned societies created knowledge;
universities transmitted it
 The number of official learned societies grew exponentially after
1700 as part of a Europe-wide institutional movement. Among
scientific societies, for example, the first half of the century
witnessed the creation of the leading national institutions: London
(1662), Paris (1666), Berlin (1700), Saint Petersburg (1724),
Stockholm (1739), and Copenhagen (1742). Major provincial and
regional societies arose at this time in Montpellier (1706),
Bordeaux (1712), Bologna (1714), Lyons (1724), Dijon (1725,
1740), and Uppsala (1728). The period following 1750 saw the
appearance of societies in lesser European states and
provinces…

17. Rôle of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century,
Martha Ornstein (1928)
 Before the seventeenth century there were no such
places as laboratories except for chemistry which
grew out of alchemy with its apothecaries, furnaces
and glass containers. While her arguments rests on
the importance of experiment and observation that
further demanded precise measurement and
‘demonstrable facts’, introducing a dynamism into
science, Ornstein does not place enough
significance on the relationship between alchemy
and chemistry in the birth of experimental science.

18. Renaissance academies
The organizational and institutional character of eighteenth-century
learned societies developed from Renaissance antecedents and
the humanist movement.
The Renaissance academies ‘changed [the] conditions for the
organization of learning in the early modern period’ developing a
civil and public function that developed charters and were official
corporate bodies receiving financial support from the state.
Unlike the universities they had no institutional goals and did no
teaching. Learned societies in the eighteenth century were
complimentary to universities: the former were responsible for
creating knowledge while the later transmitted it.

19. Development of journal
systems
 Learned society journals in the natural sciences, while only about a
quarter of all journals in the field, accounted for most of the important
and original science.
 The research journal beginning with The Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society in 1665 was controversial and ridiculed. Disputes
of discoveries occurred often and discoveries were announced in the
form of anagrams; peer review the cornerstone of academic
publishing developed much later.
 What is more, the societies became to formalize interorganizational
links with other societies across national boundaries beginning in the
mid-eighteenth century extending the idea of public institutions into a
network of scientific agencies.
 Many of the national societies formulated their research goals,
undertook systematic research and sponsored expeditions.

20. Late Development of Peer Review
 1752 Royal Society of London’s creation of a “Committee on
Papers” to oversee the review and selection of texts (1731, Royal
Society of Edinburgh)
 In “From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review” Mario
Biagioli argues that the genealogy of peer review lie in
seventeenth-century academic book publishing, and that peer
review of journal articles formed a much later stage in the
process’s development.
 Biagioli ties the establishment of editorial peer review to the royal
license that was required for the legal sale of printed texts; this
mode of state censorship, employed to prevent sedition or heresy,
was delegated to the royal academies through the imprimatur
granted them at the time of their founding.

21. Peer review & state censorship
 “No book be printed by order of the council, which hath not been perused and
considered by two of the council, who shall report, that such book contains nothing
but what is suitable to the design and work of the society” (RS Resolution 1663)
 The purpose of such review, as Biagioli emphasizes, is more related to censorship
than to quality control: “As in traditional book licensing, the review was about
making sure that a text did not make unacceptable claims rather than to certify that
it made good claims” (Biagioli 23).
 “Gradually, however, scholarly societies facilitated a transition in scientific peer
review from state censorship to self-policing, allowing them a degree of autonomy
but simultaneously creating, in the Foucauldian sense, a disciplinary technology,
one that produces the conditions of possibility for the academic disciplines that it
authorizes.”
 Fitzpatrick, K. (2009). Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the
Future of the Academy

22. The Rise of Public Science
William Eamon (1985)
 “Only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with
the emergence of new technology, new institutions for
the promotion of scientific activity, and institutional
mechanisms to protect the interests of discoverers, did
the conception of science as "public knowledge" take
form. These developments resulted in changes in the
mechanisms for the dissemination of scientific
knowledge, and also in a transformation of the ethics
governing the relationship between science and its
public” (p. 321).

23. From secret to open societies
 The ‘opening up’ of the closed world of medieval science
based on secret societies and self-governing autonomous
nature of universities that existed in self-imposed isolation to
the printing press which revolutionized scientific
communication and transformed the exchange, organization
and governance of knowledge.
 The concept of the right of intellectual property, guaranteed
through patents and copyrights, emerged in response to a
growing awareness that scientific knowledge could be put to
practical use, and that as long as new discoveries were kept
secret, the advance of knowledge, and hence profit, would be
retarded (Eamon, 1985: 329).

24. New scientific knowledge
 Learned societies had become the major vehicles for
the creation of new scientific knowledge closely related
to developments of journal systems and the
dissemination of knowledge but also, perhaps more
crucially, a commitment to the public nature science
and knowledge. They became responsible for taking on
civic functions of issuing standards in architecture, of
popularizing standard works through dictionaries,
encyclopedias and other reference works.

25. Experimental Science in the Age of Magic
 The beginnings of experimental science has its roots
in the history of secret societies based on esoteric
religion, alchemy and magic with a self-conscious
lineage going back into the ancient world of
Zarathrustra, the Persian priest, Pythagoras, and
forms of neo-Platonism.
 Secret societies developing in the Renaissance drew
on the work of Hermes Trimegistus, forms of
Gnosticism (gnosis meaning ‘knowledge’), the
Cathars, the Knights Templar, forms of esoteric
Judaism such as Cabalism and even aspects of the
history of Shi’ite Islam.

26. Alchemy and science
 Lauran Kassall (2001) records the books on alchemy underwent
rapid growth during the sixty years after 1600 with ‘198 volumes
containing 320 alchemical titles had been printed in English’ (p.
66). Kassall (2011) explains how Boyle and Newton had
‘rehabilitating alchemy, replacing her mystical green robes with the
white coat of science’ and going on to write.
 The Ashmolean (after Elias Ashmole) became the first university
museum built in 1678–1683 to house the collection (including
antique coins, books, engravings, geological specimens, and
zoological specimens) Ashmole donated Oxford University in
1677. It became the first chemistry laboratory in England.

27. Alchemy as experimental philosophy
 “In the late seventeenth century laboratory alchemy
reached new heights of sophistication, prompted by, for
instance, Johann van Helmont’s combination of
Geberian corpuscularianism and Paracelsian vitalism.
Alchemy became a subject identified with experimental
philosophy. Weight superseded quality as a measure of
chymical processes; salt began to be investigated as
the secret of creation; and alchemical conventions of
witnessing informed the notions of testimony
established in the early Royal Society” (p. 62).

28. The Scientific Revolution and the
Origins of Modern Science
John Henry (2002)
 The natural philosophy of the Middle Ages,
which had tended to remain aloof from
mathematic and more pragmatic or
experimental arts and sciences, became
amalgamated with these other approaches to
the analysis of nature, to give rise to something
much closer to our notion of science (p. 5)

29. Francis Bacon’s ‘Experimentall Learning’ and
the Rise of the Royal Society
Francis Bacon “made no new discoveries, developed no technical
innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature” yet
nevertheless he is convinced of Bacon’s importance as “a
philosopher of science — perhaps the first one who really
mattered”. Henry (2002)
He points to three key factors comprising Bacon’s importance: an
insistence on experimental method rather than armchair
speculation; the notion that a new knowledge of nature should be
turned to the practical benefit of mankind; and the championing of
inductive over deductive logic. “In a very real sense,” he
concludes,“ Bacon invented modern science.”

30. Bacon and the Royal Society
 As a civil servant Bacon believed in a useful science
that can and should be pursued in the public interest
under the aegis of the state, a vision he explains in the
description of Solomon’s House in Bacon’s fable New
Atlantis. He was the first to put forward a coherent view
on how to use the power of modern science for the
benefit of mankind aiming at power over nature in order
to improve the human condition.

31. Science as a Public Good
The concept of public good goes back at least to Adam Smith (1776)
in maintaining public institutions and public works, and the
argument for regarding science as a public good goes back
explicitly to Bacon.
Bacon, among his other insights, was perhaps the first to record his
views on the human race” and “for virtually all time” (Bacon,
1620/2000, p. 99). He clearly saw the benefits of attempting to
reach beyond national boundaries, as was evident in his treatment
of three levels of ambition, the third of which was put in these
terms: 6 “But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power
and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his
ambition . . . is without a doubt both a more wholesome thing and
more noble than the other two”

32. Understanding the emergence of ‘open science’
institutions: functionalist economics in historical context
Paul David (2004)
 “The emergence during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries of the idea and practice of ‘open
science’ represented a break from the previously
dominant ethos of secrecy in the pursuit of‘ Nature’s
secrets’. It was a distinctive and vital organizational
aspect of the scientific revolution, from which
crystallized a new set of norms, incentives and
organizational structures that reinforced scientific
researchers’ commitments to rapid disclosure of new
knowledge.”

33. “Knowledge as a Global Public Good: The Role and Importance
of Open Access”
 “By doing away with technological, legal and monetary
barriers to knowledge, the Open Access movement has
created unprecedented possibilities to treat knowledge
and science as global public goods, the benefits of
which reach across borders and population groups.
The OA and OS movements a play a crucial role in the
emergence of a truly ‘global public’, which is principally
unbound and not limited by spatial forms of integration
of society. In the OA model, knowledge is public, non-
exclusive and available for all to enjoy” (p. 163).

34. Learned Societies as ‘Knowledge Cultures’: Emerging public
knowledge ecologies
The learned society provides a model that is neither state nor market that
has a long history of a commitment to public knowledge and science
based on peer review and governance as an essential characteristic
of science and scholarship, along with replicability, testability and the
cultivation of a critical attitude that is the essence of peer review.
Learned societies also provide a useful set of norms upon which to
generalize and establish the learning society as a generalized science
model committed to the public good.
New models of open science and open knowledge production based on
principles of global public goods and an ethos of sharing and
collaboration create new transnational academic communities in
global knowledge ecologies that intersect in novel ways (Peters,
2010a).

35. The future of scholarly
publishing
 The future of scholarly publishing that has been a subject of
considerable debate in recent years, as the Internet disrupts
traditional publishing business models. Open access poses a direct
challenge to commercial publishing, however, this focus has tended to
neglect broader and deeper questions about what we call ‘academic
knowledge ecologies’, including questions of content development
processes as well as their resourcing and sustainability. In this context
‘openness’ is a new code word for ‘public’ developed in terms of
freedom and creativity. Strategic knowledge development requires an
understanding of this changing historical context.

36. Academic renewal
 What kinds of renewal do our academic knowledge
systems require, in order to improve their quality,
effectiveness and value as an integral part of the research
and knowledge building infrastructure of the ‘knowledge
economy’? How do new forms of openness promote the
building of knowledge cultures? We address these
questions through a range of issues that serve as the
basis for future research

37. The issues
1. Pre-Publication Knowledge Validation
2. Prospects of Open Peer Review
3. Resourcing models and sustainability
4. Intellectual property and public good science
5. Distributed knowledge (and learning) systems
6. Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity
7. Modes of representation and signification
8. Globalism and Intercultural Publishing
9. Reconfiguring the role of learned societies and the university
10. Conditions of knowledge creation and distribution for a ‘knowledge economy’

38. The Future of Learned
Societies
 Learned societies have played a crucial role in
this historical process and now face a bewildering
array of experimental new technologies that will
alter the process of research and scientific
communication providing a range of new
platforms for the creation of global public
knowledge goods, redefining the shape, nature
and purpose of the university in the process.