Learned Society Publishing

Reclaiming Society Publishing

Learned societies have become aligned with commercial publishers, who have increasingly taken over the latter’s function as independent providers of scholarly information. Using the example of geographical societies, the advantages and disadvantages of this trend are examined. It is argued that in an era of digital publication, learned societies can offer leadership with a new model of open acc...

What I've Learned about Publishing a Book

Keeping a learned society young

Aging organizations – regardless of whether they are firms, faculties, societies, political bodies, teams, or national academies – seek ways to rejuvenate. This paper demonstrates that the best way to keep an organization young is through a mixed strategy of recruiting both young and old, and that, contrary to intuition, recruiting those of middle age is the least effective strategy for maintai...

Medical student selection and society: Lessons we learned from so-ciological theories

The aim of this study was to show the interaction between the society, applicants and medical schools in terms of medical student selection. In this study, the trends to implement social factors in the selection process were highlighted. These social factors were explored through functionalism and conflict theories, each focusing on different categories of social factors. While functionalist th...

The Low Mortality of a Learned Society

This study addresses the mortality of the members of a learned society. Following the literature on the social gradient of mortality, members of a learned society should exhibit much lower death rates than other social groups. We use biographical records from the members of the Austrian Academy of Sciences between 1847 and 2005 and compare their mortality to Austrian life table death rates of t...