When the APS Press relaunch began in early 2023, in addition to sorting out the future for APS Books, the Press staff turned its attention to the Society's two historic journals. Transactions, the oldest scholarly journal in America dating back to 1771, needed a more robust content-pipeline and its younger sibling Proceedings, which began printing transcripts of talks delivered at the APS in 1838, went on hiatus in 2020. Both have remained excellent sources of scholarship throughout their long history, but they required attention to again be truly leading interdisciplinary journals, hubs of national and international scholarly exchange.
Interim Press Director Peter Dougherty’s first order of business was to overhaul the editorial approach and distribution systems of both publications. In February of 2023, he hired seasoned journal editors Kate Tyler Wall (Managing Editor of the Journal of the Early Republic) to lead Transactions and Laura Spero (Managing Editor of Early American Studies) to revive Proceedings. In May of 2023, the APS Press entered a distribution partnership with Penn Press that would house both publications within Penn’s world-class journals program, led by Jocelyn Dawson.
With modern distribution systems in place and highly competent editors at the helm, the growing Press staff set about studying the history of both journals in order to reimagine them for the 21st century. Transactions, though it began by publishing volumes of multiple articles on astronomy, geology, biology, ethnography, archaeology, and other disciplines, had transitioned in the early 20th century into something more akin to a monograph series. From 1906 onward, each issue featured one work, often quite long and written by a single author. The new editorial team decided to make all of these issues available as books, while returning Transactions to its roots as a proper journal, with plans to release four issues per year, each with multiple essays organized around a unifying theme.
Manuscripts of new Transactions papers will come predominantly from conferences organized by the APS’s Library & Museum. The first of these, Indigenous Studies in Archives and Beyond, edited by Jennifer O’Neal, was released in March of 2024. Since then, the Press has also reprinted the papers of the 1945 Atomic Energy Conference with a stirring foreword by leading scientist and Obama-administration science advisor John P. Holdren. I wrote about that issue here.
Upcoming releases include an issue edited by incoming APS Chief Executive Officer Patrick Spero on The Meanings of Independence, as well as an anthology titled The Best of the Blog: How Knowledge Becomes Really Useful, featuring the best essays that initially appeared as posts on the APS Blog and edited by APS Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs Brenna Holland and Library Support Assistant Megan Hosie. We are steadily accumulating a backlog of quality papers by scholars at all stages of their careers, and we hope to soon see Transactions return to a key place in the contemporary academic conversation.
Proceedings has been, from its inception, primarily focused on publishing the transcripts of talks delivered at APS Meetings. When the COVID pandemic shut down conferences all over the world, Proceedings and many similar journals were unable to produce content, and went dormant. With the world back on its feet and APS Members returning to bi-yearly meetings, the journal is back up and running. The revived Proceedings will also continue the tradition of publishing “Biographical Memoirs” of dearly departed APS Members, short articles on their lives and achievements written by surviving Members, colleagues, and friends.
Laura Spero, having brought Proceedings back to life nearly singlehandedly, will be handing off editorship of the journal this September to Editor Bill Jordan (an APS Member) and Managing Editor Annalisa Zox-Weaver.
Thanks to Penn Press’s efforts, as well as the APS’s own ongoing publicity campaign, subscriptions numbers of both journals are once again on the rise. Pre-2023 issues of Transactions and Proceedings remain available on JSTOR for existing institutional subscribers, and new issues are now accessible through ProjectMuse. Moving forward, all past and present issues of Transactions will be available through DeGruyter as part of the APS Legacy Collection, which begins distribution this fall. Content of both Transactions and Proceedings is now freely available to all APS Members through the Member Portal. These new distribution practices have already done wonders for both journals’ subscriber numbers and impact.
Though the monograph remains the gold standard of individual scholarly achievement, the health of a discipline can perhaps be best measured by the liveliness of its peer-reviewed journals. The disciplines represented by the APS carry on their internal debates in pages of hundreds of such journals. We hope that the revived Transactions and Proceedings may contribute not only to the production and circulation of useful knowledge within disciplines, but may offer a new, dynamic venue for scholars to reach beyond their fields to a truly multidisciplinary readership.