Credit, Copyright, and the Circulation of Scientific Knowledge: The Royal Society in the Long Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we consider the Royal Society's attitudes towards the copying, reprinting, and reuse of material from its Philosophical Transactions during the long nineteenth century. The contents of the Transactions circulated in print in a variety of ways beyond its traditional biannual parts and bound annual volumes. This included the private circulation of authors' separate copies of papers; the reissuing of papers in authors' collected works; the incorporation of material into other books; and the reporting and excerpting of material in the general scientific periodical literature. The Royal Society attempted to protect the originality and priority of the research published under its imprint, but it never sought to use copyright legislation to prevent (or to profit from) the reprinting or reuse of its research. We argue that copyright was in fact a poor tool for learned institutions like the Royal Society, which were more concerned with reputational credit than with financial credit and were adept at managing the delicate balance between institutional interests and those of individual authors. We demonstrate that the Royal Society's approach to reprinting and reuse was based on the philanthropic concept of a scholarly common good. It typically relied on a code of conduct enforced through tradition and moral suasion, rather than legislation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".