Collecting a list of learned societies

Michelle Brook

Happy Open Data Day 2015!

To celebrate, I’m going to spend the day curating a list of UK based learned societies, and scientific organisations to release later today/tomorrow as an openly licensed data set. I’ll then hopefully update the Wikipedia page – which is woefully incomplete.

It would be great to have some help if you’re interested. At present I’m looking just to gather names of organisations and websites.

I’ve merged a number of lists of learned societies and scientific organisations together, into a Google spreadsheet, and shall spend the next few hours tidying it up, making notes, and hunting down other organisations to include.

Scientific organisations and learned societies are not defined terms, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some are professional with paid staff, others entirely voluntary, and they may caryy out a wide range of activities from publishing through to arranging meetings or networking events. They may provide grants and bursaries, get involved in public engagement and outreach, or get involved in political lobbying.

The criteria for inclusion on the list:

  1. The organisation or group should be a learned society or scientific organisation. Although these aren’t defined terms, often an organisation claims to be one or looks a lot like other organisations which claim to be one. The key things to look for are that it must be a membership organisation that is in some way linked to an area of research. I don’t want to include organisations who are solely professional bodies – although some learned societies also act in this way. There are lots of grey areas though and I’m very keen to explore them in the future – so if you aren’t sure, please do add it!
  2. Based in the UK. This means the main physical base or contact address should be in the UK and/or the organisation specifically states that it is an organisation for either the whole UK or part of the UK.

Thanks for the help – and if nothing else, please just make sure you add your learned society or organisation on to the sheet!

6 thoughts on “Collecting a list of learned societies”

  2. Thanks for doing this… do you know anybody working on learned societies in the US? BTW Lou Woodley sent me a link to your learned society blog. I’d be interested in any additional research you do. cheers B

    Like

    Reply

    1. Thanks for this Bruce and always great to hear from others interested in the same area!

      I don’t know anyone working on this area in the US, but I am hoping to do a bit of research into this space and am currently looking for funding, so I can prioritise this over other things. I’ll keep you updated.

      Michelle

      Like

      Reply
  3. Pingback: Think of science like an incurable intellectual disease (Part 3) | Virtual Democracy
  4. Pingback: How One Typeface Took Over Movie Posters – AIA Filmmakers

Share your thoughts