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Under Vernacular Bushels: Language as Science Policy in the Reorganisation of Nordic Scientific Publication, 1960–1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2025

Jenny Beckman Open the ORCID record for Jenny Beckman [Opens in a new window]
Jenny Beckman*
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Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
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Email: jenny.beckman@idehist.uu.se
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Abstract

In this paper I discuss the fundamental reorganisation of Swedish scientific publication in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of ‘internationalisation’ and, in particular, the elimination of periodicals, which was deemed necessary to achieve visibility in a crowded international landscape of publication. In this context, publication language was not so much a matter of choice on the part of individual scientists as a result of explicit policies implemented by government agencies. Investigating the shift towards English as a dominant publication language in Swedish science requires focusing on research councils and policymakers as crucial actors in this process. I discuss the history of the languages of science in the context of the history of scientific publication and the history of information management, specifically in the context of the ‘information explosion’ of the 1960s.

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Contemporary European History , First View , pp. 1 - 15
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When Eugene Garfield, the father of the Science Citation Index, published a survey of Scandinavian scientific journals in 1976, he praised their international, even ‘supranational’ character.Footnote 1 Scandinavians ‘took care not to hide their scientific light under vernacular bushels’.Footnote 2 In other words, their journals were published in English.

In this article, I argue that the dominance of English was the result of a long process of ‘rationalisation’ and ‘internationalisation’ of Scandinavian, and specifically Swedish, scientific publications. As conceived by the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council (NSRC) in the decades after the Second World War, rationalisation entailed specialising and reducing the number of scientific publications, as well as making them commercially viable. Along related lines, internationalisation entailed making Swedish scientific publications more prominent by merging small vernacular publications into larger, predominantly English-language journals. It resulted in a reorientation of languages and audiences in existing journals, and the birth of new journals and the death of others.

In his study of the languages of science, Michael Gordin describes the shift to English in the post-war period as permeating from the ground up, rather than as a result of policy on the part of international organisations. The political dominance of Anglophone countries in such organisations, the post-war backlash against Germany and the prominence of the United States in research created what he describes as a ‘gravitational pull’ towards English.Footnote 3 In contrast, I argue that national policy organisations played a key role in this development. I find, paradoxically, that these organisations conceptualised the adoption of English as a language of science as a national endeavour, even though they presented it under the banner of ‘internationalisation’.

In this paper I discuss the fundamental reorganisation of Swedish scientific publication in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of ‘internationalisation’ in the context of debates about the ‘information explosion’ in the period. In particular, I focus on the elimination of periodicals, which was deemed necessary to achieve visibility in a crowded international landscape of publication. In this context, publication language was not so much a matter of choice on the part of individual scientists as a result of explicit policies implemented by government agencies. Investigating the shift towards English as a dominant publication language in Swedish science requires focusing on research councils and policymakers as crucial actors in this process, particularly as it relates to the wider political context of Nordic collaboration in the post-war era.

The Explosion and Destruction of Information

Scientific publication changed dramatically in the post-war period, in terms of volume, standardisation and the organisation of publishing and distribution. These changes have been ascribed to a number of factors, most prominent among them the rising costs of printing and editorial work, and the tremendous increase in the volume of publication and research activity.Footnote 4 From the 1960s, a common concern among scientists and administrators was the ‘information explosion’ characterising society in general, and science in particular. The most well-known articulation of the situation is that of Derek de Solla Price, who in 1963 predicted that, if the rate of growth continued for another century, there would be two scientists for every man, woman and dog, all of them producing scientific papers.Footnote 5

The information explosion of the 1960s was neither the first nor the last of its kind. Ann Blair has described strategies for managing the volume of information in the early modern period, and Alex Wright has detailed Paul Otlet’s grandiose plans for a ‘Mundaneum’ in the early twentieth century, where all the information of the world would be available, and above all searchable, via index cards and categorisations.Footnote 6 The same period saw the proliferation of abstract journals, where publications from a variety of sources were referenced and summarised to facilitate overview.Footnote 7

In the 1960s, yet another tool for finding, as well as evaluating, scientific publications was launched: the Science Citation Index (SCI). Inspired by practices for referencing legal cases, Eugene Garfield developed an index of scientific publications, where the number of citations of journals and specific articles were recorded, eventually in terms of the mean number of citations for each journal, the ‘impact factor’. The SCI could serve as a guide for consumers of knowledge looking for the most relevant journals and articles to devote their precious attention to.Footnote 8

For producers of knowledge, inclusion in the SCI could be viewed as a measure of their success. While a pre-war project like the Mundaneum provided search tools for readers, post-war authors and journals coveted visibility, now signalled via the journal impact factor. The SCI revealed, as well as constructed, a map of the landscape of scientific publication, where different fields, disciplines and languages performed differently on the scale of impact factors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it reflected the American background of its creator, focusing on English-language journals, which were the only ones to achieve widespread impact according to the SCI.Footnote 9

Information excess can be dealt with through technologies of indexing, recording and searching. Less well studied are technologies of reduction, destruction or erasure. Ann Blair has described the practices of extraction, elision and re-contextualisation that made knowledge available in new formats without overtaxing the early modern reader.Footnote 10 More radically, books are continuously weeded from libraries and files culled from archives as a matter of routine, making destruction an integral part of the processes of collection and preservation.Footnote 11 These techniques played an important role in the ‘internationalisation’ of Swedish scientific publication in the 1960s, a process that implied not only renewal but also destruction. A great number of Swedish scientific periodicals were discontinued, sometimes merged with others to form bigger, often more specialised journals, sometimes dying quietly in library stacks.

Destruction, erasure and forgetting as knowledge practices have nevertheless received increased attention in recent years.Footnote 12 They have predominantly been discussed in terms of the deliberate or routine exclusion of particular perspectives from archives, libraries and curricula, sometimes in the form of book-burning and censorship, sometimes in the less overtly violent form of collection choices.Footnote 13 A related discussion concerns the right to be forgotten, brought to a head in the discussion of the longevity of social media.Footnote 14 Erasure as a bureaucratic activity – culling, weeding, appraisal – has a less dramatic history, yet it is central to archival and library practice. Here, I examine the death of scientific journals as events construed as bureaucratic and indeed ‘rational’ in this sense, yet often experienced as dramatic and existential by participants.

Language, Scientific Publication and Nordic Collaboration in the Post-War Period

The actual practice of scholarly publication in the post-war period is surprisingly underexamined, in both the history of science and the broader scholarship on the history of knowledge.Footnote 15 Historians of scientific publication have focused on the emergence and standardisation of scientific journals in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as on chronicling the history of specific journals.Footnote 16 One notable exception is David Dellstig, who has studied the transformation in the 1980s from the perspective of two Swedish journals in the humanities and social sciences. He describes the emergence of commercial publishing conglomerates, who took on the economic risk and relieved small journals of the burden of editorial work – eventually at great cost to academic libraries and subscribers.Footnote 17

Aileen Fyfe identifies the threat to journals in the 1950s as an economic one, prompting efforts to make journals more commercially viable through promotion, pricing and administration.Footnote 18 But the threat of extinction was also administrative and deliberate, as a strategy for making publications more visible and influential. In the case of Swedish journals in the 1960s, culling the flora of publications would make it possible for the privileged few to become visible and grow. Visibility can be approached as a problem for consumers – how to find what you are looking for – or as a problem for producers – highlighting your works and making them, as Eugene Garfield put it, ‘detectable’.Footnote 19 For Swedish policymakers in the 1960s, visibility was primarily a matter of size and language. A journal had to contain enough material to be worth seeking out, and consequently it needed to have a large enough catchment area of authors to provide this content. It needed to be accessible to potential readers in libraries or by affordable subscription, and written in a comprehensible language. By the 1960s, this language was mostly judged to be English (and to a lesser extent, German and French).

Measures such as the SCI validated the aspiration of most Swedish science policymakers: that the key to success was ‘internationalisation’. Internationalisation was construed as achieving greater visibility outside Sweden by means of language, smaller reading volumes and specialisation. By publishing primarily in English in more focused journals, Swedish scientists would appeal to a more receptive and influential audience, exchanging local colleagues for international specialists.

In this process, policymakers played a crucial role. As government spending on research and education increased, so did concern that expenses should be well managed and put to the best use. The increase in volume and expense should ideally result in a corresponding increase in visibility and impact for Swedish science. The history of modern scientific publication has focused on universities, scientific societies and commercial businesses as publishers.Footnote 20 Instead, I emphasise the role of research policy organisations on the national and international level, as central actors in the reorganisation of scientific publication. In Sweden, the scholarly publication market has always relied heavily on patronage and subsidies, from private sponsors and government grants, typically channelled through non-governmental organisations such as academies.Footnote 21 With the establishment of ‘deliberate and coherent’ science policy after the Second World War, publication was included in the remit of the new research councils.Footnote 22

Established in 1946, the Natural Sciences Research Council (NSRC) was tasked with supporting scientific research, specifically Swedish scientific research. A central aspect of this endeavour, and a measure of its success, was making Swedish research internationally competitive and visible via publication. On one hand, ‘national’ science in the sense of being produced by Swedish scientists in Swedish institutions was to be supported; on the other, ‘national’ science in the sense of language, topics and readers was to be discouraged in favour of the ‘international’.

In the Swedish context, the ‘international’ took on a very specific meaning: the Nordic or Scandinavian.Footnote 23 The 1960s was a period of intensified collaboration between the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The focus shifted from earlier plans for a Nordic Economic Union as Denmark moved closer to the European Economic Community, and Finland maintained its complicated relations with the Eastern Bloc.Footnote 24 Nordic collaboration was promoted as both a part of, and an alternative to, European and other international organisations, and provided a framework for managing Cold War tensions.Footnote 25 But it was also an arena for practical collaboration, particularly in the fields of technology, the environment and culture.Footnote 26 By pooling their resources, in terms of funding as well as knowledge production, the Nordic countries could make their mark on international science, publishing in English in larger and often more specialised journals. The power of science policy organisations in scientific publication, on both the Swedish and Nordic levels, reflects their crucial economic role as publication costs were rising, and the practical and political importance of Nordic collaboration.

In his study of the globalisation of the social sciences, Johan Heilbron qualifies the core–periphery structure of publication by introducing the concept of ‘transnational regionalisation’, referring primarily to the development of European science policy in the 1980s partly as a response to American hegemony.Footnote 27 While this might in part be applicable to the policies of the Swedish and Nordic policymakers of the 1960s, their goal was not primarily to establish themselves as an alternative to the dominant American journals, but to serve as a launchpad for Nordic researchers into an international community. However, the weakness of the Nordic publication market coupled with the strength of the Nordic and national policy organisations made their efforts especially consequential. What I will call ‘Nordic internationalism’ became a policy tool for Swedish visibility, and language was consequently cast as a policy imperative, rather than as an individual research choice.Footnote 28 Nordic publication policies thus reveal a response to a perceived American hegemony that predates the emergence of a European research policy. In this context, ‘Nordic’ was cast as both ‘national’ and ‘international’.

The problems of coordinating the national, the regional and the international in terms of languages, topics and audiences, were seen as particularly urgent in the field sciences, such as botany, zoology and geology.Footnote 29 Many journals in these fields retained a more diverse readership than in most other disciplines and covered a wider range of topics both geographically and in terms of specialisation. They were the first targets in the attempts by the NSRC to rationalise and internationalise Swedish scientific publication, and their publication structures were the most profoundly affected. The reorganisation of Swedish botanical journals provides a particularly revealing case of the delineation of the ‘international’ in Swedish journal reorganisation, and the consequent decimation of journals. It also highlights the different reactions and strategies of journal publishers when confronted with the suggestions, demands and coercion of the policy organisations: resistance, acquiescence, transformation and death.

First, I outline the changing language practices in Swedish scientific publication from the early eighteenth century. Second, I discuss the NSRC and its efforts to ‘internationalise’ publication in the context of Nordic internationalism. Third, I describe the specific changes in botanical publication in the 1960s and 1970s.

Language in Swedish Scientific Publication

The language of scientific publication is conventionally described as shifting from Latin, to the vernacular and eventually to English over the course of the last 300 years.Footnote 30 However, the shift was neither uniform nor comprehensive across languages, nations or disciplines. In many contexts, several languages were used at the same time, within the covers of the same publication and in the production of the same author. Language choice was connected to changing career structures, funding opportunities and book markets, as well as authors and readers.

Swedish scientific publication aligns, on the whole, with the general narrative.Footnote 31 Swedish university publications – mainly dissertations, typically written by professors and defended by students – were written in Latin until the early nineteenth century, a practice shared with most other European universities in the period.Footnote 32 But scholarly works occasionally appeared in other languages, in varying frequency in different places, and the late seventeenth century saw a rapid increase in publications in the vernacular. These were often published by scholarly societies and institutions at least nominally independent of universities, the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society, established in 1665, being one of the earliest. Several scientific societies were founded in Sweden in the first half of the eighteenth century, notably the Uppsala Scientific Society – originally Collegium Curiosorum – in 1710, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences founded in Stockholm – deliberately not a university town – in 1739. Both declared themselves independent alternatives to the universities; however, both counted primarily, if not exclusively, university professors among their fellows, and soon received royal patronage. The Acta of the Uppsala Society were published in Latin; the Transactions of the Stockholm Academy in Swedish.

The choice of language reflected the different locations, fellowship and audiences of the publications. The Uppsala society was more academic and professorial, whereas the Academy explicitly aimed for a wider readership in order to disseminate ‘useful knowledge’ (as well as to invite contributions from common people who might possess such useful knowledge unknown to universities and administrators).Footnote 33 The question of language has been cited as one reason why members of the older Uppsala society split and set up their own Academy in Stockholm.Footnote 34

The rise of the vernacular as a language of science in the eighteenth and particularly nineteenth centuries reflects expanding national institutions and bureaucracies, creating incentives like jobs and funding for vernacular career building – a ‘nationalisation’ of science.Footnote 35 However, many scientific papers published in Swedish also appeared in English, French and German versions in other European publications, sometimes translated by the authors themselves, sometimes by friends and disciples.Footnote 36 In the course of the nineteenth century, Swedish as a scientific language was increasingly challenged at home as well. In 1868, the mathematician Fabian Wrede suggested that ‘purely scientific’ papers accepted for publication in the Academy Transactions – until then exclusively Swedish-language – should be allowed to be printed in either German, French or English, since the very few potential readers in Sweden could presumably read modern languages. By 1900, Swedish had almost completely disappeared from the Transactions, but German and French were more common than English. As for the journal of the Uppsala society, it remained predominantly Latin until the 1860s, with occasional papers in mathematics published in French from the 1830s.

However, by the late nineteenth century, the Academy and its several periodicals no longer exercised the same domination of Swedish scientific publication as in earlier years. The requirement that academic dissertations be published in Latin was abolished in 1852, and the flora of publications had grown, often produced by new specialised scientific societies. Language policies varied from publication to publication, and from discipline to discipline. As Wrede’s proposal had indicated, most papers in the exact sciences were published in either French, German or English, even in Swedish periodicals. Many periodicals in the biological and geological sciences remained mainly Swedish-language, but with a generous sprinkling of other languages, including an article in the artificial language Ido in the journal of the Geological Society in 1919.Footnote 37

In the years after the Second World War, a new generation of scientific journals was launched, publishing primarily in English and with an intended readership both within and outside Scandinavia. In 1947, plant physiologists from four Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland – gathered to lament the difficulty of publishing their work in international journals and founded a society to publish an English-language journal, Physiologia Plantarum, from the following year. The decision was influenced by indications from the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council that Scandinavian publications would be favoured economically.Footnote 38 Acta Chemica Scandinavica was established in 1947 as a collaborative effort of four national chemical societies, each with their own editor. Similarly, Nordic ecologists founded the journal Oikos in 1949 to publish works by Nordic ecologists as well as by ‘foreigners’ writing on Scandinavian topics.Footnote 39 Oikos also summarised works originally published in other languages for an English-speaking audience. An earlier venture, although Swedish rather than Scandinavian, was Hereditas, founded by the Mendelian Society in Lund in 1920, and printing articles in English, French or German.Footnote 40

The concerns about international publication opportunities voiced by the plant physiologists were reflected in and partly prompted by Swedish science policy. In 1948, the newly formed Natural Sciences Research Council instituted a Publication Board, tasked with making Swedish science more visible to an international audience. Their primary tool was money.

The Publication Boards and Nordic Internationalism

The NSRC was immediately drafted into the distribution of government subsidies to scientific publications. The government had formally been involved in funding publications since the early nineteenth century, sometimes channelling the money through institutions such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and other academies, sometimes directly through the ‘grant for learned institutions’.Footnote 41 After the Second World War, when government involvement in research was formalised in the form of several research councils, these councils assumed responsibility for distributing government funding for scientific publications. The initial, and primary, task of the NSRC Publication Board was assessing applications for publication subsidies.

However, the Board was also given a more comprehensive mission to advance ‘rational’ forms of scientific publication.Footnote 42 The ostensible reason was economic: to ensure that the NSRC funding could cover the needs of an ever-growing number of publications. In practice, the Board began taking measures to restructure publication in the natural sciences in its entirety.Footnote 43

Most scientific journals and monographs at the time were published by scientific societies or institutions and funded through membership fees and, to a lesser extent, subscriptions; and in the case of university departments and libraries, via government funding.Footnote 44 However, as membership numbers began to decrease and production costs rose, the funding provided through the research councils assumed a greater role in the economy of scientific publication. Rather than simply approving or rejecting grant applications, the NSRC Publication Board endeavoured to gain a more complete insight into the economic status of scientific journals, classifying them according to volume, periodicity and level of support.Footnote 45 A series of enquiries was initiated to map Swedish scientific publications by discipline, beginning with geology.Footnote 46

The ultimate goal of the rationalisation efforts was internationalisation. Internationalisation, in this context, meant visibility and recognition of Swedish research outside Sweden.Footnote 47 Visibility was construed as a question of language but also as a question of reduction. With a less diverse flora of publications, significant papers would be easier to spot, particularly if they were in English and, perhaps even more significantly, published in a journal with an international-sounding name. Thus, as the NSRC promoted the launch of new English-language journals, a larger number of established journals were to be reformed or, more often, discontinued. The head of the NSRC expressed the matter more brutally, as a clean-up among ‘second-class journals of local interest’.Footnote 48 Another NSRC member deplored the old practice of letting ‘kindly fools … manage things with laughable funding’.Footnote 49

The meaning of internationalisation and the role of the NSRC in it was complicated by the fact that the NSRC mission was to increase the impact of Swedish research and scientists internationally. Thus, they could only support Swedish (or, as we shall see, Nordic) journals, and primarily because Swedish scientists were publishing with them.Footnote 50 There was a long-running discussion of so-called page charges, where non-Nordic authors would have to pay to have their papers published in Council-supported journals.Footnote 51

In practice, these questions were negotiated by casting Nordic journals as ‘international’ journals. Nordic research organisations had begun pooling information about publishing in the early 1960s, under the auspices of the Culture commission of the Nordic Council [Nordiska kulturkommissionen].Footnote 52 In 1967, a Nordic Publication Board (NOP) was formed, heavily dominated by the Swedish Publication Board, which brought its twenty years of experience to the table. The main goal of NOP was ‘to give economic support to Nordic scientific journals serving the international market, and publishing mainly in English’.Footnote 53 One of its first major undertakings was organising a conference on Nordic publication in 1970, inviting editors, publishers and funders from four Nordic countries. The conference highlighted the divisions within the scientific community that the Swedish Publication Board had been grappling with. Journal editors were sceptical of research councils interfering in publishing and editing, while conceding that their funding was urgently needed.Footnote 54 Some expressed doubt that the Nordic countries, even taken together, provided a large enough market for journals to be commercially viable – and that this challenged the notion that the goal should be commercial viability in the first place. To this objection, the representative of the Swedish Publication Board, Per Brinck, who was also the head of NOP, stated that it had never even occurred to him that journals should not be regarded from a business standpoint. ‘The best publication board is the one which is not needed.’Footnote 55

The proposed new Nordic journals would be predominantly published in English. Many journals published by scientific societies and institutions were multilingual, accepting papers in English, German and French, as well as in the Scandinavian languages (Finnish being a common exception). Thus, in the context of journal reform, ‘international’ meant ‘Nordic’, and ‘Nordic’ in practice meant ‘English-language’. Swedish and the other Scandinavian languages were relegated to local and, at a stretch, national publications, typically concerned with descriptive work (in geology, zoology and botany) or more or less popular science (in mathematics and astronomy).

Botanical Journals: Amateurs, Taxonomists, Scandinavians

The changes in Swedish botanical publication in the course of the 1960s and 1970s provide a particularly instructive case of the discussions and results of the NSRC reform efforts. The field of botany boasted a large number of journals and other periodical publications, with a large and diverse readership. As at least partly a field science, it was particularly concerned with questions of geography, in terms of topics as well as audiences. Botany was historically a Swedish flagship science, with Linnaeus at the head of a long line of prominent botanists, and one of the oldest botanical journals, Botaniska notiser (BN) dating from 1839 was published by the Lund Botanical Society. Preserving the status of Swedish botany was thus a priority in several senses.

Botany, along with geology and zoology, had been identified as a prime target in the rationalisation effort of the NSRC. The journals were many and varied – estimated at fifty in 1977 – and most of them were published by scientific societies or institutions, surviving on membership fees and institutional subsidies rather than sales.Footnote 56 Many publications appeared in Swedish or even Latin; monographs were common; the same journal often contained articles on national as well as international topics and included a range of botanical specialties. The two largest journals, Botaniska Notiser and Svensk Botanisk Tidskrift (SBT, founded in 1907), were both published by botanical societies, and while predominantly taxonomically oriented, they printed articles in a range of areas and languages. In addition, a number of smaller society journals published articles on more specialised topics. The English-language Physiologia Plantarum had been founded in 1948 in order to reach an international readership, but it, too, was managed by a scientific society, the newly formed Scandinavian Plant Physiology Society. Lethaia, a journal focusing on palaeobiology, was also founded as a joint Scandinavian venture in 1968 as a result of lengthy discussions about the rationalisation of geological publication, and encouraged by the NOP.Footnote 57 In the other Nordic countries the situation was similar, with venerable national periodicals with a general focus, and a growing number of specialised journals, many of them publishing in a variety of languages. Thus, a number of new journals had appeared, while the old ones continued unabated. By the early 1970s, botanical publication in Sweden was considered so diverse and costly that it affected other scientific disciplines, and journal editors warned of an imminent ‘crisis’.Footnote 58

In the 1960s, the Swedish Publication Board had initiated its rationalisation efforts by calling for a division of labour between BN and SBT, tasking the former with aiming for an international audience and the latter with national and regional topics, thus avoiding the ‘discrimination’ of amateur botanists who were recognised as the core membership of the botanical societies and consequently the economic foundation of the journals.Footnote 59 The editorial language of BN switched to English, but the name hung on and a few articles were still published in Swedish until the early 1970s. Nevertheless, the change was deemed too abrupt even for the rationalisation enthusiasts, and BN suffered for it.Footnote 60 SBT, on the other hand, after much disgruntlement at the change of direction, gained subscribers at a rapid rate throughout the 1970s.

An inquiry was launched by the NSRC to develop a plan for a coordinated reform of botanical publication in general. The inquiry published its results in 1974, choosing English as the publication language to reach ‘circles outside the national bodies most immediately concerned’.Footnote 61 (These circles were primarily the European plant physiologists, who were at the time considering forming a federation and a journal.Footnote 62) The first priority of the inquiry was to promote international publication in botany, but it acknowledged that ‘material with a more local approach’ needed to be taken into account. Language, geography and audience were all seen to be closely linked and could serve as the basis for rationalisation. The NSRC solution was for each scientific field to support three journals (or kinds of journals): those focusing on local topics and intended for local readers, predominantly Swedish-language; national journals intended for national readers with mixed languages; and international journals with an international audience, publishing in English. All categories of journals were expected to be more or less self-sufficient, whether based on subscriptions or membership fees. In highly specialised fields, Sweden might not be able to provide a sufficient number of contributors and potential subscribers, which was a significant problem since the task of the NSRC was to support specifically Swedish science. As the NOP noted on the Nordic level, it was not always easy to determine the ‘natural’ number of journals for each field, and economic viability was not necessarily a reliable guide.Footnote 63

In the light of the NSRC ambition to separate journals according to language, region and audience, it was problematic that both BN and SBT were ‘mixed’ publications ‘with professional ambitions but resting on a base of amateur interest’.Footnote 64 While this created a ‘broad foundation’ for these journals and gave them an ‘evangelising effect’ that fit well with the NSRC mission to promote the use of scientific knowledge in society, their finances were often shaky. The proposed solution was completing the separation begun in the 1960s by designating one as a purely ‘amateur’ journal funded through membership and subscription, and the other a vehicle for primary scientific publications, eligible for support from the Publication Board. Accordingly, after 1974 the distinction between BN and SBT was accentuated further. BN was to have an international profile and publish in English; while SBT would address a Nordic audience with articles on general topics in Swedish.Footnote 65 The growth of SBT continued, going from 500 subscribers to 1250 in 1976, while BN continued to struggle.Footnote 66

The Publication Board also initiated administrative reforms in the wake of the 1974 enquiry. A centralised editorial Service Office serving all botanical journals was established, to save money and facilitate coordination.Footnote 67 Not everybody was enthusiastic. The editors of the Uppsala University annual Symbolae botanicae Upsaliensis declined to participate, disapproving of what they regarded as bureaucratisation and centralisation.Footnote 68 More surprisingly, the editors of the English-language Nordic journals Oikos and Physiologia Plantarum were increasingly frustrated by the Service Office and the rules of the NOP, which had seemingly been designed to cater to their needs. They left the system to pursue solvency on their own – an ironic development, since the editor of Oikos, Per Brinck, was also the head of the NOP.Footnote 69

The NSRC Publication Board wanted to go even further, and merge several periodicals to form a joint Nordic journal. In this, they were aided by NOP, the Nordic Publication Board and the managers of the new Service Office. The Service Office presented a concrete proposal for a new Nordic journal in June 1979, which would replace the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian journals of general botany with a ‘Nordic Journal of Botany’, thus ending their runs, their names and their reputations, however venerable.Footnote 70 Representatives of all publishers of botanical journals were invited to a meeting in Oslo in November of the same year, where their fate would be decided.Footnote 71 The meeting was preceded by a frenzy of local meetings, letters and conversations. Many were critical: the Lund Botanical Society, publishers of BN, objected vehemently to the demise of their journal, the Uppsala botanists withdrew from collaboration and a member of NOP resigned in protest.Footnote 72 Nevertheless, the new journal was launched in 1980. The final BN issue celebrated the long history of the journal since its beginning in 1839 and exhorted its readers to make its successor, the Nordic Journal of Botany, successful – ‘whatever our feelings may be’.Footnote 73 Despite these radical efforts at rationalisation, the first funding request to NOP from the new Nordic journal was considered too extravagant, and reduced.Footnote 74

By 1980, SBT had changed its audience and language at NOP’s behest and flourished, while BN had done the same and died. Other journals such as Oikos and Symbolae botanicae Upsaliensis withdrew from NOP’s influence to preserve their independence, at the cost of its economic and administrative support. And the new Nordic botanical journal launched from the ashes of four Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish journals had yet to prove its compliance with NOP norms.Footnote 75

Conclusion: Language, Visibility and the Devil

From the foundation of NOP, its officials eagerly followed the fortunes of Nordic journals in the SCI. They were pleased to note that while the average article received thirteen citations in 1974, Nordic articles boasted sixteen.Footnote 76 While only nine of the nineteen journals supported by NOP were (as yet in 1974) included in the SCI, the Nordic palaeontological journal Lethaia had the highest impact factor in its field.Footnote 77 (Others were more sceptical of assigning the SCI too much influence or even allowing it to determine funding decisions, pointing out that patterns of citation varied among disciplines and publication conventions.Footnote 78)

The success of the Nordic journals in the SCI was seen as validation of the endeavour for visibility: the SCI ‘directs the eyes of the world towards the journals in its listings’, as the NOP officials put it quite literally.Footnote 79 And that visibility was to a large extent a function of language was confirmed by Eugene Garfield himself, who observed that Scandinavian journals, though few, were themselves cited by other journals with noticeably high impact factors, attesting to the ‘basic internationalism of the Scandinavian publications’.Footnote 80

Garfield placed the Scandinavian journals in stark contrast with the French, which he castigated as provincial.Footnote 81 French scientific publishers were among the most vocal in defending the choice of the vernacular as scientific language, not least as a means of communication with audiences beyond academia, in industry and commerce. At a conference for scientific editors in 1977 – the first of its kind – French and Canadian editors pointed out that, for instance, chemists working in industry might not as readily read an English paper as one in their own vernacular; yet their education and, at least partly, their activities resembled those of their academic peers.Footnote 82 In contrast, their Swedish colleague Anders Kylin, editor of the Nordic Physiologia Plantarum, did not even consider his native language.Footnote 83 His own journal formally accepted papers in English, French and German, but Kylin argued that language skills in even French and German were dwindling, in Sweden as well as elsewhere, and that English was the only viable language going forward. Kylin had been instrumental in the 1974 reorganisation of Swedish botanical publication, where an important ambition was dividing audiences rather than uniting them, separating journals focusing on ‘amateurs’, like SBT, from those aiming at ‘international’ readers, like BN and later the Nordic Journal of Botany. While French editors argued for language as a means of keeping disciplines and audiences together, Swedish journals used the same tool for specialisation.

The shift towards English can also be seen as part of a more general trend towards standardisation in the period. Numerous conferences were organised on scientific writing, the abstract format, nomenclature and, not least, on the role of the scientific editor.Footnote 84 A Committee of West European Research Councils was established in 1972, to share experiences and initiate collaborations. The NOP and NSRC were driving forces in this development, providing the secretariat of the committee and the template for a proposed rationalisation of scientific publication on a European level.Footnote 85 However, with the caveat ‘que l’on pose le problème des langues et qu’on y apporte une réponse claire’ – the quote significantly made in French in an otherwise English presentation.Footnote 86

As Johan Heilbron notes, the Framework programmes of the European Research Council stimulated transnational collaboration and publication in Europe from the 1980s.Footnote 87 The European organisations proposed in the 1970s lacked such administrative or economic power. However, the NOP and the NSRC possessed both the tools and the intent to ‘internationalise’ Nordic and Swedish publication. Switching to English and reducing the number of journals would make individual publications more visible to an international audience. Publishing in English in a Nordic journal served both to highlight the international character of the publication and to boost the prominence of the individual Nordic countries as important players in the world of science. In this sense, ‘Nordic’ stood for both ‘national’ and ‘international’.

The changes to the language practices in Swedish scientific publication in the 1960s and 1970s were not the first of their kind. They may be described as yet another wave in the fluctuations among scientific languages since the early modern period.Footnote 88 But the actors involved in these fluctuations changed over time. In the Nordic countries, policymakers played a central part in pushing publication towards English. In his conference presentation, Kylin presented the problem as one of individual choice and skills on the part of authors and reviewers. However, the policies of NOP and the Swedish NSRC Publication Board point to the institutional pressure being exerted on authors and journals. English gradually replaced multilingualism as a vehicle of international relations in scientific publication, but it did so partly as a matter of policy. The SCI was already beginning to sort journals. The NSRC and NOP wanted to control the situation and do their own sorting and weeding. Their solution was not only encouraging journals to become more cost-efficient and skilled at advertising, similar to the measures taken by British journals in the same period, described by Aileen Fyfe.Footnote 89 Equally, or even more important, was purposefully eradicating journals not deemed profitable, impactful or ‘international’ enough. By the late 1970s, numerous publications had perished at the hands of NSRC and NOP, including all the traditional journals of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, once the pioneer of vernacular scientific publication in Sweden.

Destruction was thus an essential aspect of international visibility. Reducing the number of publications would clear the field for the remaining ones, eliminating competitors for attention as well as for significant papers. While internationalisation – in terms of language and Nordic collaboration – and commercial viability provided the explicit rationale for elimination, the process involved judgements of scientific quality in terms of audience, discipline and geography. Seen as a process of elimination, internationalisation was drawn-out and often painful, involving letting go of journal names, histories and readers, in the hope of gaining new audiences and – to use the increasingly popular term – higher impact. Letting the Publication Board into the editorial office meant, in practice, ‘inviting the devil’.Footnote 90

References

1 Eugene Garfield, ‘Journal Citation Studies. 28. Scandinavian Journals’, in Essays of an Information Scientist, vol. 2, by Eugene Garfield (Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1977), 599–605, 602.

2 Garfield, ‘Journal Citation Studies’, 599.

3 Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English (London: Profile Books, 2015), 306–9. As Gordin points out, most of the scholarship on English as the language of science is sociological and linguistic, rather than historical; but see Scott L. Montgomery, Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For contemporary perspectives on English as a language of science, see the essays in Ulrich Ammon, ed., The Dominance of English as a Language of Science: Effects on Other Languages and Language Communities (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001).

4 For an overview, see Aileen Fyfe, ‘Self-Help for Learned Journals: Scientific Societies and the Commerce of Publishing in the 1950s’, History of Science 60, no. 2 (2022): 255–79; also Gustaf Nelhans, Citeringens Praktiker: Det Vetenskapliga Publicerandet som Teori, Metod och Forskningspolitik (Göteborg: Filosofi, lingvistik och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs universitet, 2013); David Dellstig, Den Efterfrågade Vetenskapen: Universitetsbibliotek, Akademiska Tidskrifter och Vetenskapliga Förlag 1968–2018 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2020).

5 Derek de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 19.

6 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

7 Though, as historians of scientific publication have pointed out, the commonplace publication of excerpts, abstracts and translations in scientific journals predates abstract journals by hundreds of years. Jonathan Topham, ‘Anthologizing the Book of Nature: The Origins of the Scientific Journal and Circulation of Knowledge in Late Georgian Britain’, in The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, India and China: The Early-Modern World to the Twentieth Century, ed. Bernard Lightman, Gordon McOuat and Larry Stewart (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 120–52; Jenny Beckman, ‘The Publication Strategies of Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848): Negotiating National and Linguistic Boundaries in Chemistry’, Annals of Science 73, no. 2 (2016): 195–207; Iain P. Watts, ‘“We Want No Authors”: William Nicholson and the Contested Role of the Scientific Journal in Britain, 1797–1813’, British Journal for History of Science 47, no. 3 (2014): 397–419.

8 Nelhans, Citeringens Praktiker; de Solla Price, Little Science; Paul Wouters, The Citation Culture (Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1999). Garfield’s own perspective is presented in Eugene Garfield, ‘The Evolution of the Science Citation Index’, International Microbiology 10, no. 1 (2007): 65–69. The ‘impact factor’ was used from 1975.

9 Eugene Garfield, ‘English – An International Language for Science?’ [1967], Essays of an Information Scientist, vol 1: 1962–73 (Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1977), 19–20. Garfield’s views on the subject were conscientiously studied by Scandinavian officials. ‘Den vitenskapelige litteratur i Skandinavia’, NOP-Nytt 5, no. 3 (1979): 7–12.

10 Blair, Too Much, chapter 4.

11 Johan Fredrikzon and Chris Haffenden, ‘Towards Erasure Studies: Excavating the Material Conditions of Memory and Forgetting’, Memory, Mind & Media 2, no. 3 (2023).

12 Michael Moss and David Thomas, eds., Archival Silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023). See also Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

13 See, for instance, Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

14 The right to be forgotten is now incorporated in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Article 17. https://www.gdpreu.org/right-to-be-forgotten/, accessed on 18 March 2024.

15 Fyfe, ‘Self-Help’. For an overview of the circulation of knowledge in a Nordic context, with a greater emphasis on the humanities, see Johan Östling, Erling Sandmo, David Larsson Heidenblad, Anna Nilsson Hammar and Kari H. Nordberg, eds., Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations in the History of Knowledge (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2018).

16 Alex Csiszar, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); James E. McClellan III, ‘The Scientific Press in Transition: Rozier’s Journal and the Scientific Societies in the 1770s’, Annals of Science 36, no. 5 (1979): 425–49; Thomas Broman, ‘Periodical Literature’, in Books and Sciences in History, ed. Nicholas Jardine and Marina Frasca-Spada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 225–38; Melinda Baldwin, Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015); for Swedish examples, see Sverker Sörlin, ‘The Environment as Seen through the Life of a Journal: Ambio 1972–2022’, Ambio 50, no. 1 (2021): 10–30; Anna Tunlid, Ulf Kristoffersson and Fredrik Åström, ‘A Century of Hereditas: From Local Publication to International Journal’, Hereditas 157, no. 1 (2020).

17 Dellstig, Efterfrågade.

18 Fyfe, ‘Self-Help’.

19 Garfield, ‘English – An International Language for Science?’, 19–20. ‘Findability’ is a recent addition to the flora of terms in the context of the internet. Peter Morville, Ambient Findability (Sebastopol, CA: Oreilly, 2005).

20 For an overview, see Aileen Fyfe, Kelly Coate, Stephen Curry, Stuart Lawson, Noah Moxham and Camilla Mörk Röstvik, Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research (St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 2017).

21 For a discussion of the funding of Swedish scientific periodicals in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Beckman, ‘Berzelius’. Patronage and publication subsidies have long been a topic in book history, though often in the context of individual authors; see Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65–83, for a classic example.

22 Rune Premfors, Svensk forskningspolitik (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1986), 11.

23 In this paper, and in common with the historical actors, I will use both ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ when referring to journals and organisations involving Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, even though linguistically Scandinavia includes only Sweden, Norway and Denmark (as well as Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which were not involved in the publication projects discussed in this paper). This distinction, and its promotional and pedagogical implications, was a matter for debate in the period; see Nikolas Glover, ‘Unity Exposed: The Scandinavia Pavilions at the World Exhibitions in 1967 and 1970’, in Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region, ed. Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 219–39, 222–3.

24 Nina Wormbs, Vem älskade Tele-X? Konflikter om satelliter i Norden 1974–1989 (Hedemora: Gidlund, 2003); Hallvard Notaker, ‘Staging Discord: Nordic Corporatism in the European Conservation Year 1970’, Contemporary European History 29 (2020): 309–24; Claes Wiklund and Bengt Sundelius, ‘Nordic Cooperation in the Seventies: Trends and Patterns’, Scandinavian Political Studies 2 (1979): 99–120; Claes Wiklund and Bengt Sundelius, eds., Norden i sicksack: Tre spårbyten inom nordiskt samarbete (Stockholm: Santérus 2000); Glover, ‘Unity Exposed’, 221.

25 On Nordic collaboration as a Cold War public relations project, see Glover, ‘Unity Exposed’; Christine Ingebritsen, ‘Norm Entrepreneurs: Scandinavia’s Role in World Politics’, Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association 37, no. 1 (2002): 11–23.

26 For a study of the European Conservation Year 1970 as an arena both for promoting Nordic unity and for hands-on institution building, see Jenny Beckman, ‘Mapping Nordic Nature: Conservation Expertise and International Collaboration, c. 1970’, in To Take Us Lands Away: Essays in Honour of Margaret R. Hunt, ed. Katarina Nordström, Astrid Wendel-Hansen and Francisca Hoyer (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2022), 189–203; for a different take, see Notaker, ‘Staging Discord’.

27 Johan Heilbron, ‘The Social Sciences as an Emerging Global Field’, Current Sociology 62, no. 5 (2014): 685–703.

28 For a critical discussion of the notion of ‘language choice’ in contemporary academia, see Linus Salö, The Sociolinguistics of Academic Publishing: Language and the Practices of Homo Academicus (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 19–21.

29 Per Brinck, ‘1960-talets Publiceringspolitik och Nordiska Publiceringsnämndens Tillkomst’, NOP-Nytt 9, no. 4 (1983): 4–6.

30 On Latin, see Bo Lindberg, De lärdes modersmål: Latin, humanism och vetenskap i 1700-talets Sverige (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1984); on the later shift, see Gordin, Babel.

31 Gordin calls the pattern ‘almost cliché’; Babel, 299.

32 Bo Lindberg, Disputation, dissertation, avhandling: Historien om en genre (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitetsakademien, 2022).

33 On languages in Swedish Academy publications, see Jenny Beckman, ‘“Sections of One Great Institution”: Prizes, Publications, and Transnational Communication at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in the Nineteenth Century’ Nuncius 34, no. 2 (2019): 377–91; on the history of the Uppsala and Stockholm societies, see Johan Kärnfelt, Karl Grandin and Solveig Jülich, eds., Knowledge in Motion: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Making of Modern Society (Göteborg: Makadam Förlag, 2018); Hans Ellegren, Hvad Nytt och Nyttigt: Tillkomsten av Sveriges Första Lärda Sällskap: Kungl. Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala (Uppsala: Kungl. Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala 2019).

34 Ellegren, Hvad Nytt, 253–5.

35 For a useful discussion of nationalisation in the context of Franco-German rivalry in the nineteenth century, see Alan Rocke, Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

36 Beckman, ‘Berzelius’; Beckman, ‘Sections’.

37 Peter Bengtson, ‘One Hundred Volumes of Geologiska Föreningens i Stockholm Förhandlingar’, Geologiska Föreningen i Stockholm Förhandlingar 100, no. 4 (1978): 413.

38 Anders Kylin, ‘NOP-N och Rationaliseringarna på Botanikområdet’, NOP-Nytt 9, no. 4 (1983): 16–29.

39 ‘Oikos’, Oikos 1, no. 1 (1949): n.p.

40 Tunlid et al., ‘Hereditas’, 4.

41 1945 års universitetsberedning 6. Den vetenskapliga publiceringsverksamheten, personal-, institutions- och stipendiefrågor m. m.; Det akademiska befordringsväsendet. Statens offentliga utredningar 1951:9 (Stockholm: Svenska tryckeriaktiebolaget, 1951), particularly 20.

42 On the concept of ‘rationalisation’ in Swedish political discourse, see Ron Eyerman, ‘Rationalizing Intellectuals: Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s’, Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 777–807.

43 The instructions for the Publication Board are printed in NOP-konferens om de samordiska naturvetenskapliga tidskrifterna på Voksenåsen, Norge den 26–27 oktober 1970. Anföranden och diskussionsinlägg (Stockholm: Nordiska publiceringsnämnden för naturvetenskap (NOP), 1971), Bilaga 3. The story is also told by one of the main actors: Brinck, ‘1960-talets publiceringspolitik’.

44 See introduction by Per Brinck to the Nordic conference on scientific publication in 1970. NOP-konferens om de samordiska naturvetenskapliga tidskrifterna på Voksenåsen, Norge den 26–27 oktober 1970. Anföranden och diskussionsinlägg (Stockholm: Nordiska publiceringsnämnden för naturvetenskap (NOP), 1971), 2.

45 Minutes of the Publication Board 45, 24 November 1960; Publiceringsnämndens protokoll 50, 21 May 1962. Archives of Statens naturvetenskapliga forskningsråd 1947–1977, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

46 Publiceringsnämndens protokoll 50, 21 May 1962. Archives of Statens naturvetenskapliga forskningsråd 1947–1977, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

47 On the preoccupation with publication language and measuring up to international research among Swedish psychology scholars in the 1950s, see Salö, Sociolinguistics, 60–1.

48 Brinck, ‘1960-talets publiceringspolitik’; Letter from Gösta W. Funke to Per Brinck 24 Oct. 1969, Papers of Per Brinck, File 11, Universitetsbiblioteket, Lund University.

49 Letter from Karl Myrbäck to Per Brinck 21 Jan. 1970, Papers of Per Brinck, File 20, Universitetsbiblioteket, Lund University.

50 Kylin, ‘NOP-N och Rationaliseringarna på Botanikområdet’.

51 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, publisher of several scientific journals threatened by the NSRC policies, adopted page charges as an emergency measure, but many considered page charges to be an obstacle to success rather than a boon. Lamek Hulthén, ‘PM angående KVA:s publiceringsverksamhet’, 21 May 1969; Letter from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to the Publication Board, 22 Oct. 1970; Robert Nilsson, ‘PM angående aktuella publiceringsfrågor i Europa’, no date; Lamek Hulthén Papers, Archives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. The NSRC went back and forth on whether it would fund page charges for Swedish authors publishing in journals practicing this policy. Minutes of the Publication Board 83, 4 Feb. 1975; Minutes of the Publication Board 84, 6 June 1975, 4 Feb. 1975, Archives of Statens naturvetenskapliga forskningsråd 1947–1977, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. On page charges in American physics journals – the most prominent template for the Swedish discussion – see Tom Scheiding, ‘Paying for Knowledge One Page at a Time: The Author Fee in Physics in Twentieth-Century America’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39 (2009): 219–47. On the risk of shutting international authors out via page charges, particularly those from less affluent nations, see Anders Martinsson, ‘NOP-tidsskriftene og forskere fra u-land. En kommentar’, NOP-Nytt 3, no. 4 (1977): 3.

52 Rationalisering av tidskriftsproduktionen i de nordiska länderna (Stockholm: Nordiska kulturkommissionen, 1963); Nils Andrén, ‘Nordiska kulturkommissionen lägger grunden’, in Norden i sicksack: Tre spårbyten inom nordiskt samarbete, ed. Claes Wiklund and Bengt Sundelius (Stockholm: Santérus 2000), 47–66.

53 ‘Hva og hvem er NOP?’ NOP-Nytt 1, no. 1 (1975): 10. Synnöve Irgens-Jensen, ‘Experiences of The Nordic Publishing Board in Science (NOP)’, in Scientific Information Transfer: The Editor’s Role. Proceedings of the First International Conference of Scientific Editors, April 24–29, 1977, Jerusalem, ed. Miriam Balaban (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978).

54 Comment by A. Sandbo, NOP-konferens om de samordiska naturvetenskapliga tidskrifterna på Voksenåsen, Norge den 26–27 oktober 1970: Anföranden och diskussionsinlägg (Stockholm: Nordiska publiceringsnämnden för naturvetenskap (NOP)), 15.

55 Comment by Per Brinck, NOP-konferens om de samordiska naturvetenskapliga tidskrifterna på Voksenåsen, Norge den 26–27 oktober 1970: Anföranden och diskussionsinlägg, 21.

56 The estimate was made by four concerned journal editors in 1977. Letter from Arne Müntzing, Anders Martinsson, Per Brinck and Stig Falk to the Publication Board, 14 Jan. 1977, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–80, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97.

57 1965 års geoutredning, Geovetenskaplig utbildning och forskning: Plan för utbildning och forskning inom geologiska och vissa andra angränsande ämnen (Stockholm: UKÄ, 1968), 254–5.

58 Kylin, ‘NOP-N och Rationaliseringarna på Botanikområdet’; NSRC Publication Board, ‘Instruktion för NFR:s Serviceinrättning för publiceringen i botanik’, 14 Mar. 1975, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1974–1979. Rapporter, PM, arbetsmaterial SBF_ID 0546/Ö89. The apparently ongoing ‘crisis’ was emphasised in a later letter to the Publication Board by four journal editors. Letter from Arne Müntzing, Anders Martinsson, Per Brinck and Stig Falk to the Publication Board, 14 Jan. 1977, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–1980, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97.

59 Minutes of the Board of the Swedish Botanical Society 18 Nov. 1966, File SBF:s Styrelseprotokoll 1946–1968; Minutes of the Board of the Swedish Botanical Society 12 Mar. 1968, File SBF:s Styrelseprotokoll 1946–1968. See also Anders Kylin, ‘Publication policy in Swedish botany’. Botaniska Notiser 133, no. 4 (1980): 443–450.

60 Minutes of the Swedish Botanical Society, 15 Apr. 1971, File Protokoll över (sammanträden) årsmöten 1932–1988, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, describing the division as ‘forced’.

61 Statens naturvetenskapliga forskningsråd, Botanical Publication in Sweden: Analysis. By a committee appointed by the publication board of the Swedish natural science research council (Stockholm: Statens naturvetenskapliga forskningsråd, 1974), 5.

62 Kylin, ‘NOP-N och Rationaliseringarna på Botanikområdet’.

63 ’Arbeidet med rasjonalisering i botanikk’, NOP-nytt 3, no. 3 (1978): 3–4.

64 NSRC Publication Board, ‘PM betr fortsatt stöd till föreningstidskrifter och liknande’, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1974–1979. Rapporter, PM, arbetsmaterial SBF_ID 0546/Ö89.

65 Thomas Karlsson, ‘Nytt program för SBT’, Svensk botanisk tidskrift 70, no. 1 (1976): 1–2.

66 Minutes of Swedish Botanical Society, 5 May 1977, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Protokoll över (sammanträden) årsmöten 1932–1988. See also Weimarck, ‘Botaniska notiser’.

67 Thomas Karlsson, ‘Botanikredaktionen i Lund – Försök med Storredaktion’, NOP-Nytt 2, no. 2 (1976): 7–9.

68 Letter from J. Nannfeldt to NSRC Publication Board, no date. Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1974–1979, Korrespondens, SBF_ID 0547/090.

69 Per Brinck and Anders Kylin – editors of Oikos and Physiologia Plantarum – were both among the signatories of the ‘crisis’ letter in 1977 that called for a centralisation of editorial services.

70 Proposal from Botanikredaktionen i Lund, 5 June 1979. Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–1980, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97; Letter from Thomas Karlsson to the Service Office management 8 June 1979, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1974–1979, Korrespondens SBF_ID 0547/Ö90.

71 Letter from Hans Runemark to Olof Hedberg 19 October 1979, Archives of Svenska Botaniska Föreningen, Uppsala, File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–1980, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97.

72 Minnesanteckningar från diskussion 1979-10-24 i Lund ang: Förslag till gemensam nordisk tidskrift; Minnesanteckningar från sammanträde med forskare vid institutionen för systematisk botanik samt representant för växtbiologiska institutionen, Uppsala, 1979–10–22; Letter from Rolf Dahlgren to the Service Office management, 10 Oct. 1979; Excerpt from minutes of the Lund Botanical Society, 19 Oct. 1979; all in File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–1980, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97.

73 Weimarck, ‘Botaniska Notiser’.

74 Letter from Morten Lange to Anna Weimarck, 28 Nov. 1980; Letter from Morten Lange to the Board of the Nordic Journal of Botany, 28 Nov. 1980; in File Nordisk botanisk publicering 1977–1980, Korrespondens rörande förslag till en nordisk tidskrift i botanik, med bilagda PM och rapporter, SBF_ID 0553/Ö97.

75 The Nordic Journal of Botany is currently published by Wiley with an impact factor of 0.93.

76 ‘Nordiske tidsskrifter i Science Citation Index’, NOP-Nytt 2, no. 5 (1976): 6.

77 ‘Current Contents, Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Report og NOP-tidsskrifter’, NOP-Nytt 3, no. 3 (1977): 1–3.

78 Anders Martinsson, ‘Impact factor och tidskrifters betydels’, NOP-nytt 4, no. 4 (1979): 10–12.

79 ‘Current Contents, Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Report og NOP-tidsskrifter’, 3.

80 Garfield, ‘Journal Citation Studies’, 599.

81 Garfield, ‘La science française est-elle trop provinciale?’, La Recherche 7 (1976): 757–60. (Translation by E. Garfield, ‘Is French Science Too Provincial?’, Current Contents (11 Apr. 1977): 89–94.) Garfield was actively using his index and his publications to ‘assist’ editors and publishers in making the ‘transition’ to English. Garfield, ‘English – An International Language for Science’, 20.

82 Miriam Balaban, ed., Scientific Information Transfer: The Editor’s Role. Proceedings of the First International Conference of Scientific Editors, April 24–29, 1977, Jerusalem (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). Comments by M. Abadie, J. Watson, A. Kylin, 399–403.

83 Anders Kylin, ‘Economics and Organization of Scientific Publishing: The ESRC Model Study’, in Scientific Information Transfer: The Editor’s Role. Proceedings of the First International Conference of Scientific Editors, April 24–29, 1977, Jerusalem, ed. Miriam Balaban (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 391–8.

84 Kylin, ‘Economics’. On NOP discussions of standardisation, see e. g. Anders Martinsson, ‘A Coherent Philosophy of Titles, Abstracts and Keywords in Scientific Articles’, NOP-Nytt 6, no. 1 (1980): 3–7; Anders Martinsson, ‘The Scientific Editor and the Creation of a New Language’, NOP-Nytt 9, no. 1 (1983): 26–9; ‘Report of Discussion on International and Interdisciplinary Standardisation’, NOP-Nytt 6, no. 4 (1980): 28–30.

85 G.W. Funke, ‘Introductory Address’, in Science Research Councils in Europe: Report of the Conference of West European Science Research Councils held on 9–11 February 1972 at Scanticon Conference Center, Aarhus, Denmark, ed. Göran Friborg (Stockholm: Working Group of the Science Research Councils in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden concerning a West European Conference, 1972).

86 J.H. Bannier, ‘Scientific and Practical Aspects of Collaboration between the Councils’, in in Science Research Councils in Europe: Report of the Conference of West European Science Research Councils held on 9–11 February 1972 at Scanticon Conference Center, Aarhus, Denmark, ed. Göran Friborg (Stockholm: Working Group of the Science Research Councils in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden concerning a West European Conference, 1972), 137–50, 145.

87 Heilbron, ‘The Social Sciences’, 693–7.

88 For the Swedish situation, see Beckman, ‘Sections’. For a broader perspective, see Gordin, Scientific Babel.

89 Fyfe, ‘Self-Help’.

90 Brinck, ‘1960-talets publiceringspolitik’, 13.