After the war, the ideas of internationalism and universalism seemed to be fading.
The manifesto An die Kulturwelt had shocked the scholarly community because it was signed by scientists and academics who, according to tradition, were expected to maintain a neutral stance. This led to the creation of two scientific fronts. The German scientists were banned from international unions and a new organisation, the International Research Council, was established to promote the scientific co-operation among the winners.818
The isolation of Germany extended to academic publishing. Journals and abstract publications, which before the war had a wide international distribution, were now boycotted by the Allies. The whole of German scientific and bibliographical publish-ing was threatened by a diminishpublish-ing number of subscribers, increaspublish-ing costs of print-ing and lack of support from industry. Nevertheless, the crisis promoted co-operation and created centralised organisations to serve the German scholarly community.
Not-815 Minutes of the FDS 24 April 1918 § 1. In FÖRHANDLINGAR 22 (1918), pp. 57-58. Th e cita- Minutes of the FDS 24 April 1918 § 1. In FÖRHANDLINGAR 22 (1918), pp. 57-58. The cita-tion in Swedish: det stora, mäktiga och ädla folk vi i främsta rummet ha att tacka för vår frihet. The members of the FDS gave dental care to German soldiers, after the civil war. See annual report of the FDS 1918. In FÖRHANDLINGAR 23 (1919), pp. 39-45.
816 Minutes of the SFFF 4 May 1918 § 1. Archive of the SFFF. SLSA1162:1. Book 9. FNL; 13 May 1918, annual report. In MEDDELANDEN 44 (1918), pp. 176-187; minutes of the FLS 1 June 1918 § 1.
In SUOMI IV:19 (1922), pp. 67-70; minutes of the FLS 3 May 1918 § 1. In Suomi IV:20 (1927), pp. 3-4.
817 Minutes of the FAS 10 October 1918 § 10, speech and annual report. Archive of the FAS. Ca 9. NBA Archives. On Ailio, see Autio 1999 http:��artikkelihaku.kansallisbiografia.fi�artikkeli�649�
(cited 2 September 2011).
818 Somsen 2008, p. 367; Crawford 1990, pp. 261-263; Bartholomew 1989, p. 254.
gemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft was founded in 1920, to provide grants, assist in publishing and promote the acquisition of instruments and machines. Its library board aimed at filling the gaps in the foreign literature collections that had grown as a result of the war, by organising collective exchanges. Reichszentrale für naturwissenschaftliche Berichterstattung, founded in the same year, began as a centre for bibliographical and abstract work, but soon widened its activities to providing copies of scientific papers for libraries in Germany and abroad. Nordic countries, new independent states and the Soviet Union did not join the boycott of Allies, which meant that contacts with these institutions could be established.819
In the middle of the 1920s, the boycott began to erode, opening the Western mar-kets to German scientific journals. The progress of German science, fostered by the recovering economy and political stabilisation, was propagated actively in the jour-nal Forschungen und Fortschritte which was sent free of charge to foreign scientists, institutions and societies. The publishing branch recovered relatively quickly, but the rampant inflation caused remarkable rises in the price of the commercially published journals. Also, some structural differences, such as authorship and editor fees and the commissions of agents who distributed the journals raised costs in comparison with American and British serials, which usually were based on voluntary work in societies.
The American libraries occasionally objected to the German prices, but their patience ended after the financial crash of 1929. In 1931, the American Library Association launched a formal protest, which was followed by the Linnean Society of London and the Interational Federation of Library Associations. In addition to price, they were critical to the standard of German journals, for instance, the practice of publishing theses as supplementary series. The German publishers were pressured to reduce the prices of the most expensive journals from 20–30% and to lessen the volume of pub-lishing. However, the devaluation of the dollar and British pound eliminated the gains of the reduction. The problem was finally solved by the National Socialist government which, worried at the growing dominance of English language and Anglo-American culture, admitted export subsidies for journals in 1935.820
The Nazi Government generously supported research – as well as journals – which bolstered their ideology.821 At the same time, however, the regulations following the Nuremberg laws were eroding the flourishing branch of scientific publishing. Several publishing houses were originally founded by Jews. The Jewish ownership of busi-ness was proscribed by the new laws, and so too their work as editors or reviewers.
Subscriptions to foreign journals published or edited by Jews were forbidden as well.
The result was that many Jews emigrated, creating new and innovative establishments, such as Interscience and Academic Press, in the USA and the United Kingdom.
These banished publishers were instrumental in making English the language of the scientific community.822
As the old frontiers between Germany and the Allied countries were reshaping, another political division was developing between the Soviet Union and the western world. In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet research was reorganised into a structure of three
819 Behrends 1997, pp. 54-61; Дивногорцев 2007, pp. 35-36, 51-52.
820 Behrends 1997, pp. 63-65; Edelman 1994, pp. 171-176.
821 Burleigh 1988, pp. 54-55.
822 Sokoloff 2002, pp. 315-319.
distinct pyramids: first, the academy system, at the top of which was the USSR Acad-emy of Sciences, heading specialised and local academies and their institutes; second, the institutes of higher education; and third, the ministerial research establishments, usually industrial research institutes. The previous societies were mostly disbanded and replaced by government-controlled bureaus. The publishing production increased in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, but scientific publishing became subject to the control of the Academy institutes and strictly censored. The Cultural Revolution of 1928–1931 and the terror of Stalin, in the 1930s, destroyed the will of most people de-siring freedom for their research.823 Despite the ideological attacks against bourgeois science and scholarship, Soviet society was eager to organise the acquisitions of foreign literature for its research libraries. The purchases were, in the early 1920s, centralised under the authority of the Bûro inostrannoj nauki i tehniki (BINT) (The Bureau of Foreign Science and Technology), located in Berlin. It had representatives in many European capitals and provided thousands of items annually, which were mainly deposited in the major libraries. It mediated exchange offers, too. Furthermore, the exchange activities were the responsibility of the Bûro meždunarodnaâ knigobmena (The Bureau of International Exchange of Publications), which, during the NEP-period, was accompanied by a more famous player, Vsesoûznoe Obˆsestvo kul’turnoj svâzi c zagranicej VOKS (The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries ). VOKS, which nominally was a society, enjoyed more goodwill among the Western publishers than governmental institutions, but was actually under the tight control of the Communist party. Its first director, Olga Kameneva, who was a sister of Trotsky and wife of Lev Kamenev, was dismissed in 1929. Censorship increased during the rule of Stalin; foreign literature was available only in major libraries, and those considered most dangerous only in the department of secret books of the Li-brary of the Academy of Sciences.824
Apart from the increasing influence of international politics in science, the trends of academic publishing remained much the same as in the prewar period. After a temporary decrease in the growth of the number of scientific journals caused by the war, the exponential increase in titles continued and these became more and more specialised. The number of abstract journals also grew.825 In Germany, the branch of academic publishing was still mostly in the hands of commercial establishments, which carried all editorial and production costs and had to rely on subscriptions for income. In the United Kingdom and the USA, research journals were often published by learned societies and hence supported by their memberships, sometimes even by public funding or private donations. In the USA, the number of university presses multiplied. The country had not suffered from the war as much as the European countries, and private and federal funding was abundantly available to the
univer-823 Graham 1993, pp. 87-98, 122-123, 180-181; Trigger 1989, p. 216. On the publishing figures, see Дивногорцев 2007, pp. 67-68.
824 Дивногорцев 2007, pp. 34-36, 44-46, 70-77, 80, 148. Trigger (1989, pp. 214-229) says that in the NEP period, foreign contacts were mostly allowed, but in the Stalin era, current foreign publica-tions in the field of archaeology were found only in the library of the Institute of Material Culture in the Academy.
825 Meadows 1998, pp. 13-21, 30-31; Price 1986, pp. 7-10.
sities and research institutes.826 In new independent countries, scientific and scholarly publishing was continued mostly by the societies, academies and institutions founded in the nineteenth century. Voluntary work, modest government subsidies and some private financiers were the backbone of journals in these small countries which experi-enced economic difficulties after the war.827 In Finland, scholarly publishing remained mostly in the hands of learned societies which enjoyed government subsidies. The inflation, though not as high as in Germany, burdened the system because the sub-sidies increased much more slowly than the costs of paper and printing. From 1926, the Ministry of Education distributed a part of the profit funds of state lotteries to the learned societies.828 The societies, for their part, were required to submit more accurate reporting on their publications, distribution, paid honoraria, etc.829
The exchange of publications widened during the interwar period. Most of the new independent states adhered to the Brussels Conventions in the 1920s. Their ratifica-tion by China and Egypt extended the convenratifica-tions to new continents. In 1936, a new Inter-American Convention was signed in a Pan-American spirit. Bilateral agreements were established, too, especially by countries which had not signed the Brussels Con-ventions. These agreements usually focused on the exchange of official publications, but they highlighted questions which related to scientific exchanges, as custom fees and postage. The Commission of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations kept trying to secure international postal franchise on exchange material, without success, however.830 The question of information flow was grasped by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), founded in 1927. It aimed at establishing rules on the exchange of dissertations which caused many problems – the flow of literature to libraries and expenses to the doctoral candidates.831
The interwar years were in many ways a contradictory period in science and scholar-ship. On the one hand, politics had a notable effect on scientific co-operation and on academic publishing: first, the boycott of Germany; then the racial laws of the Nazis;
and third, the upheavals in Soviet science, which influenced scientific work both on an institutional and personal level. On the other hand, there were many efforts to rebuild bridges; for instance, the national and international centralised organisations, which aimed at promoting the acquisition of foreign books and journals. The economic base of scientific publishing was also varied. The seeds of commercial publishing sown in the prewar period grew in Germany in the 1920s, leading to a blossoming busi-ness, which was transferred to the USA and the United Kingdom after the political turmoil. Simultaneously, the exchange activities were promoted in many countries and by new international organisations such as the League of Nation and IFLA. The interest in exchanges was partly supported by the currency fluctuations and economic
826 Edelman 1994, pp. 171-172; Sörlin 1994, p. 210. For instance, the Carnegie institution sup- Edelman 1994, pp. 171-172; Sörlin 1994, p. 210. For instance, the Carnegie institution sup-ported journals. Stieg 1986, pp. 76-80.
827 Kobyliński 2007, pp. 71-78; Rózsa 1976, pp. 11-12. See also the memorandum written by A. M.
Tallgren and U. T. Sirelius in 1924, attached to minutes of the board of the FAS 7 Feburary 1924 § 7.
Archive of the FAS. Ca 10. NBA Archives.
828 Autio 1986, pp. 214-215; Martin 1974, p. 167.
829 1 March 1927 Tieteellinen Keskuslautakunta to the FAS, attached to minutes of the board of the FAS 3 March 1927 § 2. Archive of the FAS. Ca 11. NBA Archives.
830 Lilja 2006, pp. 58-59.
831 Gombocz 1974, pp. 9-10.
crises, but it was also still rooted in the old traditions of scholarly community, the spirit of sharing and helping. In these most turbulent of times, one can only admire scholars and scientists, who sat patiently in their studies or laboratories, persistently submitting their articles to journals as well as publishers, who in spite of economic difficulties and political constraints, continued to distribute their findings.