Introduction

Research publishing technologies have been adopted and adapted in myriad ways by social, political, scientific, government and business actors, and institutions over time, yet these more informal, ad hoc practices are often overlooked when we consider the history of research publishing. This article considers the way technological innovations in media production, from Gutenberg’s printing press to the PDF and beyond, have intersected with other historical forces, such as democratization, science, and industrialization, to support diversification as well as concentration, informal and formal practices, and non-commercial and commercial business models. Publishing by organizations plays a critical role in contemporary research publishing with many global as well as national organizations—e.g. the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—functioning as major publishers of research, despite being outside the formal academic publishing system. This shadow publishing system runs counter to the way in which scholarly communication in the form of journals and books have become increasingly centralized and commercialized. In this article I argue that there have been multiple parallel and intersecting research publishing economies developing over the last few centuries, based in multiple sectors, using the tools available at any given the time, from the printing press to PDFs, to communicate research and ideas in the public sphere.

The history of publishing offers critical insights into the ways in which media systems have developed and been used as centres and networks of symbolic power by diverse groups over time (Briggs and Burke 2009; Thompson 1995, 53). Understanding historical trends is essential for explaining the evolution of current structures of media industries and communication practices and their relationship to society (Goggin 2012; Lobato and Thomas 2015; Thompson 1995; Wasko 2012). The rise of digital technologies has generated renewed interest in the history of publishing and media industries, and various studies have shed new light on the current context including: on the history of book publishing and print culture (Levy and Mole 2017; Murray 2020; Suarez 2013), scholarly and scientific publishing (Fyfe 2020; Fyfe et al. 2017; Thompson 2005; 2010), and social histories of knowledge and the media (Briggs and Burke 2009; Burke 2000; 2012; Feather 2013; Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Gitelman 2014; Thompson 1995; Willinsky 2000).

Changes to the role of knowledge in society are driven by processes including quantification, secularization, professionalization, democratization, globalization, and technologization (Burke 2012). Similarly, Wyatt et al. (2013, 8) summarize the key trends driving knowledge production as growth, globalization, commercialization, and technological innovation. Relevant economic trends, including industrialization and the intensification of industry, also need to be considered, with media industries undergoing both concentration and diversification (Flew 2014). Mediatization has also been recognized as a major force transforming many aspects of society (Hepp 2022; Hepp and Krotz 2014; Livingstone and Lunt 2014). However, as Burke notes, many of these trends seem to be shadowed by opposing forces in play, and it is important that we keep in mind the “coexistence and interaction of trends in opposite directions” (Burke 2012, 2). Thus the nationalization of knowledge develops alongside a trend leading towards internationalization, professionalization alongside amateurization, standardization alongside customization, and democratization alongside censorship (Burke 2012). Studies of new media industries have similarly found tendencies falling on a spectrum from centralization, commercialization, and formality, to decentralization, non-commercial, and informality. As Winseck (2012, 27) states, markets are “dominated by global media conglomerates” even as there has been a corresponding move towards “specialized markets, flexible networks of production”—illustrations of the centripetal and centrifugal forces at play in media industries (see Benkler 2006; Flew 2014; Gitelman 2006; Lobato and Thomas 2015).

The last two decades have seen numerous studies on scholarly communication and the formal academic publishing industry, and on the potential of digital technologies and non-commercial, open access academic publishing models to disrupt commercial business models (Arbuckle et al. 2014; Arthur et al. 2021; Borgman 2008; Houghton, Steele and Sheehan 2006; Montgomery et al. 2018; Piwowar et al. 2018; Tennant et al. 2016). There has also been much attention paid to online research communication via new media such as blogs, vlogs, social media, pre-prints, and data (Banks 2012; Rieger 2020). But a key area that continues to be overlooked is the decentralized, often non-commercial, disaggregated publishing of research in various genres by organizations—government agencies, think tanks, research centres, and consultants—particularly on public interest and policy issues. In this article I focus on the history and significance of organization-based research publishing as a counterpoint to increasingly industrialized commercial academic publishing.

Following Nutley, Walter and Davies (2007, 21), I take a broad view of research as “any investigation towards increasing the sum of knowledge based on planned and systematic enquiry. This includes any systematic process of critical investigation and evaluation, theory building, data collection, analysis and codification relevant to the social world.” Publishing is the act of making information available to the public, in various formats and genres, using any type of market or non-market business model, distribution channel, or platform. Thus research publishing includes both explicit findings from scientific experiments published in peer-reviewed academic journals and books as well as the translation, application, and evaluation of research, policies, and practices published as reports, briefings, conference papers and factsheets, datasets and statistics, and many other genres. This latter type of material is sometimes called grey literature (Baxter and Hilbrecht 2019; Cooper et al 2020; Lawrence 2021), as it is not published through commercial publishing channels; however, in trying to understand the research publishing system, I find it more useful to think in terms of four categories or models: commercial academic publishing, non-profit academic publishing, organization-based research publishing, and commercial market-research publishing (see Lawrence 2021).

The impact of the printing press

From the late medieval and early modern period onwards there was a “systematic cultural transformation” brought about by the advent of printing, which enabled the widespread production and dissemination of knowledge in a way that was unprecedented (Thompson 1995, 46). The invention of the printing press saw a new industry quickly mushroom across Europe, with printing companies replacing scriptoriums within a few decades (Briggs and Burke 2009; Eisenstein 1979). The cost of producing print material required new skills, trades, and business models to support the new mode of production. Printing required expensive metal type, ink, a handpress, and paper, as well as the education and skills to use these tools to create quality printed products. It therefore required some level of capital investment and the need for revenue to recoup the costs of production and distribution. Bookselling, book publishing, and newspapers developed into major industries from the 17th century onwards (Briggs and Burke 2009), and we see the continual move towards formalized and standardized publication formats and business models over following centuries. By 1700, regular publications, such as monthly or weekly periodicals, gazettes, and newspapers began to appear and quickly grew into a major form of publishing for disseminating news, ideas and events (Briggs and Burke 2009). Improvements in the speed of printing and typesetting technologies in the 19^th century allowed the production of daily newspapers, resulting in a major expansion of the newspaper industry. The publishing industry also gradually increased its systems of coordination and exchange via bookfairs, associations, and international conventions.

Printing and publishing not only became major industries in Europe and around the world from the 16^th century, they contributed to ongoing cultural transformations (Eisenstein 1979). By the 17th century, there was an explosion in the production and printing of political and social pamphlets by diverse individuals and groups, and governments and the church also began using the press to publish counter-attacks. It is estimated that there were between five and ten million copies of pamphlets in circulation by 1680 (Briggs and Burke 2009, 77). From 1520 to 1790, there was a steady expansion of new publications and of new ideas that were changing society. Individuals and groups used the printing press and political pamphlets to attack existing institutions and generate public debate about reform. Such discussion and debate were further stimulated by the establishment of newspapers and coffee houses, new kinds of civil society organizations and the development of a public sphere (Habermas 1962; McKee 2005, 5).

By the 18th century, various social movements had galvanized around issues such as slavery, working conditions in industries, and child labour, using printed pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, and reports to circulate research and ideas and to lobby for social change (Hilton et al. 2013). The first non-government organizations and associations were established in the UK at this time, including trade unions, the temperance union, women’s suffrage and anti-slavery activist groups, with many engaging in publishing activities in a range of formats and genres including political pamphlets and research reports on key issues (Hilton et al. 2013). For example, in 1837 the Aborigines Protection Society republished and widely distributed (with an added introduction) a damning British House of Commons report (Select Committee and APS 1837) on the appalling treatment of Aboriginal peoples in British colonies and used this to advocate for change (Heartfield 2011). These organizations became new centres and networks of symbolic power with a level of autonomy in their publishing activities because they were supported by membership fees and donations and could therefore achieve a radically new level of independence from the power of the church, the state and the market (Thompson 1995, 56).

Governments across Europe also soon recognized that the printing press provided a way to disseminate essential information for citizens—including laws, regulations and policies, research, and policy proposals—and began producing pamphlets, reports, and other publications on law, politics, health, education, agriculture, and many other issues to inform and influence the community (Briggs and Burke 2009, 40; Thompson 1995, 56). Thus the very idea of the centralized bureaucratized nation-state developed in parallel with the spread of printing (Feather 2013, 16). Governments also became more interested in knowing about their populations and began conducting social surveys and censuses and maintaining public records and archives. The production, accumulation, circulation, and management of knowledge thus became a key function of governments around the world from the Enlightenment period onwards.

The search for new knowledge from the 17^th century gradually expanded into more and more areas of interest, from astronomy to anatomy, philosophy to paleontology, and the results required new ways of organizing, storing, and presenting information, both physically in collections of specimens and artefacts and also in written and visual forms through books. As these nascent research activities increased, there was the need to develop new ways for the results to be reported and shared. Accordingly, diagrams, tables, and the visual organization of academic books became increasingly important from the 16^th century onwards (Willinsky 2000, 64). New content and new formats for their distribution were produced with printing enabling a “new flow of data, charts, maps and theories which could be consulted, discussed and debated by scholars throughout Europe” (Thompson 1995, 58).

The production of research findings in print encouraged standardized systems of classification, representation, and research dissemination (Thompson 1995). A range of research communication practices were adopted, including a culture of corresponding via letters and publishing pamphlets, which then led to more formalized institutions such as scholarly societies, meetings, demonstrations and public lectures, journals and books, and public and private libraries, museums, and other collecting institutions and systems of classification. Over time, journal publishing formalized around an evolving set of standards and peer-review processes, yet it remained largely done by scholarly societies with little expectation of a profit until the mid 20^th century (Fyfe 2020). At the same time, many scholars continued to produce and circulate ideas and discoveries informally in various genres and formats including letters, pamphlets, reports, and public lectures.

19^th and 20^th century innovations in publishing technology

The technology of the handpress or letterpress remained relatively unchanged until the 19th century, with an average production rate of about 240 pages an hour. This increased exponentially with the industrial revolution, when the invention of the Koenig’s steam press in 1814 and the rotary printing press in 1848, together with improvements in papermaking and new forms of transport such as railways, significantly increased the speed, scale, and coverage of print production and distribution (Briggs and Burke 2009; Thompson 1995). By the end of the 19^th century, industrial presses could produce up to 360,000 pages per hour. Printing presses also now required much larger investments in machinery and “economies of scale” that incentivized the mass production and standardization of texts, and that ushered in the development of large-scale commercial publishing of newspapers, books, magazines, and journals in the 20^th century (Thompson 1995).

However, the rise of industrial presses did not mark the end of small-scale and bespoke publishing as demand for this was also high. Firstly, there was the continued use of hand operated jobbing printers by professionals and amateur printers. The end of the 19^th century also saw the invention of typewriters and duplicating machines such as the mimeograph (Figure 1.), which were affordable and easy to use in-house by organizations to produce copies of texts in smaller numbers for sale or direct distribution. Combined, these two technologies ended the monopoly of letterpress printing (Gitelman 2014, 14). These technologies were adopted by government agencies, community organizations, church groups, political movements, research centres, and industry and used to produce everything from leaflets, newsletters, and pamphlets, to reports and academic papers throughout most of the 20^th century. In 1942 the US War Production Board (WPB) had twelve “automatic mimeographs” running twenty-four hours a day and producing 6000 copies an hour (Liberman 1942). Mimeographs continue to be used by organizations around the world as they are inexpensive to run and do not require electricity, but for many organizations they were replaced by a far more powerful, in-house reproduction technology.

In 1959, Xerox began selling photocopiers to offices and libraries, which transformed the capacity for any kind of document or publication to be reproduced (Gitelman 2014; Thompson 2015). Organizations, groups, and individuals could now easily and cheaply produce and copy their own publications and documents, or copy other published material. When combined with computers, word processing, and desktop publishing software from the 1960s and 70s, the tools of small-scale publishing were now readily available to governments, organizations, research centres, and industry. As well as photocopiers, personal printing capabilities also expanded in the 1980s and ‘90s, with desk-top printers becoming standard office technology.

However, dissemination and storage of print publications were expensive and continued to be a major issue for many organizations. Commercially published materials were generally organized, indexed, and had established distribution channels via libraries, bookstores, and subscriptions. Organizations rarely had such large-scale, formal channels and few government reports could be distributed in the manner of the Beveridge report, which was translated into 22 languages, including German, and dropped on occupied Europe during WWII by the British air force (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2018). By the early 1950s, the number of reports being produced by government and research organizations was so large that alternative means of disseminating and storing them was required. The microfiche provided a breakthrough, allowing for the “storage of a 100-page report on a roughly 4 x 6-inch piece of plastic with the approximate thickness of a business card” (DeSart 2017). In the 1950s, microfiche became a key method to disseminate reports, making them cheap to produce, distribute, and store (Augur 1998, 53). Despite the difficulty of using them, microfiche remained the most cost-effective option for storing and circulating reports and indexes until the late 1990s (Augur 1998).

In the post-war period, there was a massive increase in the production and dissemination of reports driven by the need for research and knowledge across multiple sectors, usually publicly funded (Lawrence 2012). By 1963 it was estimated that the US was producing 100,000 government reports per year, and 450,000 journal articles (Weinberg et al. 1963). Many of these reports were typed and mimeographed in-house leading to concern that this abundance of scientific and technical information was not being managed and communicated effectively across governmental departments, agencies, industry, and academia. Report literature was the “crux of the current information crisis” because, unlike journal articles, they had no bibliographical controls or comprehensive collecting system (Weinberg 1963, 19).

Naturally, the increased investment in research and higher education led to an expansion in higher education and academic publishing and the range of disciplines and research areas also expanded. Commercial publishers such as Pergamon Press, led by Robert Maxwell, encouraged academics to set up new journals which were then sold back to University libraries, creating a highly lucrative business model for commercial academic publishers that continues today. At the same time, many university research centres continued to use in-house publishing, in addition to journals and books, to communicate new ideas directly with interested audiences. In the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall, published a series called “Stencilled Occasional Papers,” which was produced in-house on a mimeograph and sold cheaply or given away to members. Although the centre also established a journal, Striphas and Hayward (2013) argue that the Centre’s success “is a testament to the virtues of architecting an apparatus of ‘scholarly’ communication chiefly around grey literature.” Other disciplines, such as economics and physics, began publishing ‘working papers’ for quickly sharing ideas via the new communications networks becoming available. The post-war era also saw a rapid rise in the number of non-governmental organizations operating at both the national and international level with many of them devoting considerable resources to research, publishing, and media work (Hilton et al. 2013, 147; Sheehan and Sekuless 2012).

Computers and the internet

By the middle of the 20^th century, production, storage, dissemination, discovery, access, and use all began to be transformed by the invention of computers and digital communication systems. Computers originally designed for making numerical calculations and storing data, soon turned into new ways of producing and storing documents and keeping track of resources and information in databases and catalogues. What we now know as the internet was initially designed to create a distributed, decentralized communications network able to continue operating even if some parts of the network were under attack (Ryan 2010, 14). However, as Flew (2014) notes, it was also driven by the need for researchers in various universities to be able to communicate and work together more easily. From the beginning, the internet was used for sharing information, reports, and articles among groups of researchers across research centres, military departments, and government agencies. As Augur (1998, 59) points out, the internet “sprang from the very organizations and institutions which have long been producers of grey literature,” and quickly became a key means for disseminating their reports and papers informally.

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the internet emerged as “a public and a global communications medium” (Flew 2014, 9). The internet offered an entire publishing platform and storage system where any individual, organization, or company with a bit of technical knowledge could set up a website and publish content, or create a database to curate and store content. The combination of personal computers, word processing, and publishing software, content management, and repository software, PDFs for stable rendering on any computer, printers and photocopiers for small-scale print production, and distribution via email and the World Wide Web, provided a complete publishing and curating toolkit that was affordable and able to fit onto an office desk. Once search engines, such as Google, arrived in 1998, the internet also provided unprecedented discovery and access capabilities for research users to locate content on any topic. Library catalogues and collections also became accessible remotely, and many new kinds of online databases and digital collections were established—providing both free and subscription access to resources. Computers, email, and internet technologies were a step-change in comparison to earlier publishing technologies as they could provide low cost distribution as well as production, which was transformative for governments, research centres, and organizations wanting to publish. Indeed, in the early years of the World Wide Web, many commentators held that the internet mainly afforded support for non-commercial research publishing (Fyfe et al. 2017, 15).

Similarly, the arrival of digital technologies seemed to represent a way out of the difficulties facing academic publishing, which had found itself in a serials crisis by the end of the 20^th century due to the ever- increasing number and cost of journals being produced and sold by commercial academic publishers. Digital technologies opened up possibilities for groups interested in non-commercial academic publishing to create and use affordable, open source publishing and distribution systems and databases, to expand the production of working papers/preprints, and speed up the scholarly communication process (Lagoze et al. 2015). Digital technologies were quickly adopted by university libraries, foundations, funding bodies, and networks of researchers and scholars to set up open access journals, blogs, online books, digital repositories, and databases, and to create software, tools, and infrastructure.

Large-scale initiatives included the preprint service ArXiv established in 1991, Pubmed in, 1996, and PLOS in, 2002. There were also many initiatives by non-profit academic research groups creating their own publishing software, such as the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Open Journal System (OJS), established in 2001 at Simon Fraser University and used by thousands of research groups to create open access online journals (Alperin et al. 2019). Community-based projects driven by researcher-led networks or the wider community were also established—most famously Wikipedia, an open, collaborative online encyclopedia which began in 2001 (Lih 2009). The view and the rallying cry of many in the academic and wider community was, and continues to be, that “a non-profit future for scholarly communication is within reach and worth fighting for” (Pooley 2019). However so far multinational academic publishing companies have not only retained but increased their strangle-hold on academic journal publishing—while research publishing by organizations has continued to expand and diversify, although often ignored by the scholarly community.

In the digital age, interest groups, governments, and research centres have continued to bring their research and ideas into the public arena. In contrast to academia’s “homogenization of publication formats and outlets” (Shearer et al. 2020) and expensive subscription-only databases, organizations regularly publish research in a wide range of formats, on their own websites available for anyone to download for free (Lawrence 2018). While political pamphlets and gazettes have gone out of fashion, the PDF has allowed many of the genres being produced in print such as reports, briefings, and working papers to be reproduced and circulated with a similar level of “fixity” in digital form (Gitelman 2014). Digital technologies have enabled a revolution in scale and reach but not in kind, with many of the genres of research communication being transferred directly to digital form. Over time, new genres and formats for research communication have been developed such as blogs, infographics, interactive databases and visualizations, audio and video presentations, and much more, yet the primary research publication genres remain very similar to their print counterparts.

By producing and disseminating their own digital publications, organizations across all sectors could control the style and complexity, length and format, timing, layout and design, dissemination, and accessibility of their research communications (Hughes et al. 2021). This flexibility also has many benefits for the community, given that a large amount of research and information is made available for free online and in print, in formats that are more applicable and timely for policy and practice (Lawrence 2018). On the other hand, organization-based publishing often does not meet professional publishing standards, which creates issues in terms of stable long- term management, discoverability, and evaluation. Issues of efficiency also occur due to disaggregated publishing practices and a lack of open, interoperable collecting systems (Williamson et al. 2019). The transition to digital has also meant that many of the laws, policies, and collecting practices established in the 18^th and 19^th century, which were already under pressure, are totally inadequate for the task of managing digital public knowledge goods produced in the 21^st. As the production and distribution systems change, so must the collection and management practices and institutions. To do this effectively, we need to look beyond the formal publishing system and recognizse and understand the diversity and significance of research publications being produced outside the formal publishing economy by organizations across multiple sectors and develop adequate systems to manage them effectively.

Conclusion

Far from being a centralized monolith, research publishing historically and today has been a complex mesh of social and technological changes across multiple sectors, operating on a spectrum of public and private, community and commercial business models. Communications and information technologies have had a fundamental and transformative impact on the capacity to produce, disseminate, and store knowledge in physical forms. These technologies have been used by various groups across society, including the church, governments, political reformers and researchers, and commercial companies, to share research about scientific and public interest issues in a range of formats and channels. This process has gone hand-in-hand with the development of democratic institutions and a public sphere where issues and ideas could be circulated and discussed, and the rise of non-government organizations and associations created to represent community, business, or public interests. Although commercial publishing dominates much of the discussion of scholarly communication, it is time we paid more attention to the drivers behind the diverse and dynamic research publishing ecosystem that has been running in parallel for centuries, using small-scale media technologies and operating on spectrum of formal and informal practices and business models. The diverse and disaggregated research publishing by organizations presents many benefits and challenges, but it is undoubtedly a major part of the research publishing ecosystem that is here to stay and therefore needs to be recognized, understood, and managed effectively in the public interest.