SSP: Our 30 Years in Context, Part I

By Barbara Meyers Ford, SSP Historian and President, Meyers Consulting Services

When the Society for Scholarly Publishing began in 1978, the publishing world was just beginning to feel the impact of applying computer technology to the publishing process. After the invention of ENIAC, the first computer, in 1946, the 30 years prior to the Society saw the start of a new paradigm based on that technology and others that continues to evolve today.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the copier, photocomposition, and word-processing software changing our working environment forever. We had yet to realize the full impact of the Internet’s quiet birth in 1969. These are just some of the watershed events that influenced our field and SSP:

1948: Growth in scientific journals explodes after WWII; a decade of developments in computer technology begins

1957: Sputnik launched; U.S. aerospace research surges; ARPA created; first professional society for science editors, the Council of Biology Editors, created by an initiative of the National Science Foundation and the American Institute of Biological Sciences

1958: Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) founded by Eugene Garfield

1959: plain-paper office copier invented

c.1960: CRT composition developed

1961: Publication of first abstracts journal, Chemical Abstracts, by the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Division

1964: Dialog program initiated at Lockheed (first information retrieval service)

1966: U.S. Department of Education and National Library of Education launch Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC; free access); Medline launched by National Library of Medicine (free access begins in 1997); LexisNexis founded as the Data Corporation

1969: Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) launched by US Department of Defense (ceased operation in 1990) = birth of the Internet; at IBM, Charles Goldfarb, with Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, develop GML, the Generic Markup Language, precursor to SGML

1971: MEDLINE came into existence; Project Gutenberg launched = Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts); microprocessor & floppy disk developed; ANSI Z39.16 IMRAD Standard ratified

1973: Altair 8800 invented

1975: Field testing of Gypsy, first WYSIWYG word processor at Xerox PARC; Apple I invented

June 16, 1978 marked the day when the first SSP dues were paid, and just about one year later, in Boston, the start-up Society held its first annual meeting. Topics for discussion ranged from cost components of the scholarly communication process to a review of peer review to word processing interfacing with typesetting . . . and the future of scholarly publishing. Our 10th Annual Meeting’s keynote addressed the relationship between publishers and libraries along with changing roles for all involved in the process brought about by changing technology . . . and the future of scholarly publishing. Then at our 20th we focused on ethics in scientific publication, digital document delivery, Web-based support for book distribution, the recently announced DOI, challenges to producing quality online journals … and the future of scholarly publishing.

In Part II (coming in the July 21 issue of SSP News), I'll talk more about SSP's evolution and the many significant events that helped to shape the industry and the Society after the founding of SSP.

Meyers Ford was one of SSP’s 16 founders and member of the Pro Tem Board of Directors. Barbara continued her active support of the Society throughout the decades and evolved her own career to match the developments in publishing. Her consultancy, Meyers Consulting Services, now celebrates 25 years of a strong commitment to working with professional societies, publishers, their suppliers, and others in the scholarly communications community in their achievement of excellence in operations and purpose.