Helen M. Rozwadowski
Helen M. Rozwadowski is Professor of History & founder of the Maritime Studies program at the University of Connecticut. She has authored three books and edited seven volumes, three of which contribute to the history of ocean sciences and the rest part of the new University of Chicago Press book series, Oceans in Depth. Her first book, The Sea Knows No Boundaries (2002) is a history of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), exploring the history of 20th-century marine sciences and their support of international fisheries and marine environmental management. Her second, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (2005), was awarded several prizes including the History of Science Society's Davis Prize for best book directed to a wide public audience. Her latest book, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (2018), has been translated into Chinese and Korean. Her recent work includes the virtual exhibition Oceans in Three Paradoxes, an outgrowth of a fellowship she held at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her work has been supported by the William E. & Mary B. Ritter Fellowship of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution.
From founders' vision to global voice: a century of publishing for 'the rational exploitation of the sea'
Helen will describe the historical context for the ICES journal centenary, reflecting on the central importance of communicating science to support “the rational exploitation of the sea," the founding language used for what we now call sustainable “management."
ICES original publication, Rapports et process-verbaux des reunions (RPV), shared the results of scientific studies and printed meeting minutes. Scientific journals took their present form in the 19th century, when peer review emerged. Thus, when ICES founders began advocating for international cooperation in marine sciences, they had clear expectations for appropriate science communication.
ICES began in 1902 as a five-year agreement to collaborate on marine science. Previous to ICES, scientific results by its future experts appeared in reports published by national hydrographic or fisheries institutions – that is, what we call “grey literature." Before ICES, much marine science was published in English but early ICES publications were also printed in the diplomatic language, French. The choice of RPV reflected assumptions about the importance of making scientific knowledge available promptly in print, but it equally made sense for an institution based on short-term intergovernmental agreements. ICES also created other specialized publications, including fisheries statistics and for the Central Laboratory where standard seawater was created.
During its first quarter century, debates rocked ICES regularly, including political challenges of enticing nations to join or remain. Debates that shaped its publications included tussles over a focus on pure science versus on fisheries as well as power struggles over conducting work on regional or larger scales. World War I severely challenged ICES, but membership and geographic scope expanded in the 1920s with wartime recovery and in response to increased confidence in science. Approaching the Jubilee of 1927, ICES leaders confirmed the founders' vision that science could, and should, serve societal purposes, and instituted organizational changes that centrally involved science governance and communication to enact this vision. These included creation of the Journal du Conseil in 1926 (today's ICES Journal), with scientific leadership by the new Consultative Committee, created to provide scientific advice to parallel the political concerns of official governmental Delegates.
Between 1926 and now, the journal transformed from an in-house organ focusing on fisheries science in the northeast Atlantic to a broad topical scope, highly-respected global publication, especially following changes in the 1990s: adopting the present title (ICES Journal of Marine Sciences), switching to a prestige university press publisher, and shifting from publishing symposia results in RPV to rigorously peer-reviewed special issues of the journal. ICES commitment to communicating science to serve societal needs connects its founding publications with today's Journal.
