The article presents the fourth phase of the development of the journal Studia Historiae Scientiarum (previous name Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU / Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science). The sections of the journal were modified, as well as the peer review procedure and the bibliographic style. There has also been an increase in the number of foreign authors and reviewers of the journal.

The article presents the fourth phase of the development of the journal Studia Historiae Scientiarum (previous name Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU / Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science). The sections of the journal were modified, as well as the peer review procedure and the bibliographic style. There has also been an increase in the number of foreign authors and reviewers of the journal.

The 20th Alexandre Koyré Medal awarded since 1968 to prominent historians of science was awarded to Robert Fox, leading historian of European science of the period from the 18th to the beginnings of the 20th century. The Medal was presented to Robert Fox during the 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Prague, 23 September 2016, and the Éloge describes his career and work.

In the half-century before the Great War, collaborative international ventures in science became increasingly common. The trend, manifested in scientific congresses and attempts to establish agreement on physical units and systems of nomenclature, had important consequences.
One was the fear of information overload. How were scientists to keep abreast of the growing volume of books, journals, and reports? How were they to do so in an era without a common language? Responses to these challenges helped to foster new departures in cataloguing, bibliography, and an interest in Esperanto and other constructed languages.
By 1914, the responses had also become involved in wider movements that promoted communication as a force for peace.
The Great War dealt a severe blow to these cosmopolitan ideals, and the post-war reordering of international science did little to resurrect them.
A “national turn” during the 1920s assumed a darker form in the 1930s, as totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, and Spain associated science ever more closely with national interests.
Although the Second World War further undermined the ideal of internationalism in science, the vision of science as part of a world culture open to all soon resurfaced, notably in UNESCO.
As an aspiration, it remains with us today, in ventures for universal access to information made possible by digitization and the World Wide Web).
The challenge in the twenty-first century is how best to turn aspiration into reality.

In the half-century before the Great War, collaborative international ventures in science became increasingly common. The trend, manifested in scientific congresses and attempts to establish agreement on physical units and systems of nomenclature, had important consequences.
One was the fear of information overload. How were scientists to keep abreast of the growing volume of books, journals, and reports? How were they to do so in an era without a common language? Responses to these challenges helped to foster new departures in cataloguing, bibliography, and an interest in Esperanto and other constructed languages.
By 1914, the responses had also become involved in wider movements that promoted communication as a force for peace.
The Great War dealt a severe blow to these cosmopolitan ideals, and the post-war reordering of international science did little to resurrect them.
A “national turn” during the 1920s assumed a darker form in the 1930s, as totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, and Spain associated science ever more closely with national interests.
Although the Second World War further undermined the ideal of internationalism in science, the vision of science as part of a world culture open to all soon resurfaced, notably in UNESCO.
As an aspiration, it remains with us today, in ventures for universal access to information made possible by digitization and the World Wide Web).
The challenge in the twenty-first century is how best to turn aspiration into reality.

The article is an extended discussion with a laureate of numerous international distinctions, Professor Robert Fox, about his career, intellectual fascinations, as well as changing methods, styles, approaches and themes in the historiography of science and technology.

The article describes Polish research and discoveries in the Arctic and the Antarctic since the 19th century. The author is a geologist and since 1956 has been engaged in scientific field research on Spitsbergen, Greenland and Antarctica (23 expeditions). For many years chairman of the Committee on Polar Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, he is now its Honorary Chairman.

In August 2016 exactly one hundred years passed from the discovery of the Czochralski method of single crystal pulling, named after Jan Czochralski (1885–1953), the Polish chemist and metallurgist. To celebrate this anniversary, a translation of Czochralski main publication into Polish was published. In the present paper we show the pharmaceutical inspiration which was most likely a source of the discovery of the Czochralski method. We present the evolution of this method up to obtaining huge single crystals of silicon, the fundamental element of contemporary electronics and our civilization.

Karl Kolbenheyer was born on May 28, 1841 in Bielsko. After attending a lower secondary school in Cieszyn, he began studies in classical languages (Greek and Latin) at universities in Vienna and Jena, then he worked as a teacher in lower secondary schools in Lewocza, Cieszyn, and Bielsko. The research he undertook included botanical studies, measurements of absolute elevation, and meteorological observations in the Western Beskids as well as in the Tatra Mountains. The results of the studies were printed in German, Austrian, Polish, and Hungarian publications. He found species of plants not known earlier to exist in the area of Cieszyn and Bielsko. The measurements of elevations he made of characteristic points of landscape (more than 500) were used for cartographic purposes. From 1866 on, he was a member of Physiographic Commission of Kraków Scientific Society, and later of the Academy of Fine Arts and Science, which financially supported his field work. Karl Kolbenheyer was one of the founders of the Beskidenverein – a German tourist organisation – and managed its branch in Bielsko. He prepared two tourist guides: the guide to Tatra Mountains – Die hohe Tatra (ten editions), and to the Beskids – Führer durch die Beskiden… (two editions). These guides contributed to the remarkable propagation of tourism. Karl Kolbenheyer died on February 1, 1901, and was buried at the Old Evangelical Cemetery in Bielsko.

State institutes started emerging shortly after the establishment of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918) in the form of institutions affiliated to the Ministry of Schools and National Education. They were independent scientific institutions receiving regular state subsidies and their scientific focus and budgets were approved by the state.
The State Institute of Archaeology and the National Institute for Folk Songs were founded in 1919.
We may already follow the activities of the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Institute of Slavic Studies in the early 1920s. – even though they reached full efficiency only in 1928.
The paper shows the organizational and personal transformation of these institutions, in particular from 1948 until 1952 or 1953, when they “voluntarily” became part of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The incorporation of state institutes into the Academy of Sciences thus gives a clearer picture of the centralization of sciences in the 1950s, arranged according to the Soviet model.
 

This article addresses the appropriation of positivist thought by Ukrainian intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular in the field of philosophy of history. By discussing elements of positivist thought in the works of Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko and Pantaleimon Kulish, the author argues that all three were under direct influence of positivist thought, but none of them was a blind adherent of positivism. Positivism particularly influenced their thinking about history and the issue of determinism. Importantly, it was not the French positivism of Auguste Comte whose ideas were adopted, but rather the English positivism of Henry Thomas Buckle and John Stuart Mill.

The aim of the paper is to show the interplay between the power and the science in the context of cultural memory. The focus is on the Cyrillo-Methodian anniversaries in Bulgaria in the communist period, and the object of the analysis is the anniversary of 1969. The context relates to the process of development of new historiography and the functionalization of the nation-centric narrative. The main issue discussed is how the Communist Party, as a political institution, and the Bulgarian Academy of Science, as an academic institution, cooperated to establish a new vision of society. The discussion offers an interpretation in the light of the Orthodox concept of the symphony of power perceived as a metaphor of the relation between the secular and the spiritual power.

The concepts of Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), a microbiologist, historian, and philosopher of medicine, can be used to analyze the conservative nature of scientific ideas. This is discussed and applied to ideas dominant in the understanding of the eukaryotic cell cycle. These are (a) the G1-phase restriction point as a regulatory element of the mammalian cell cycle, (b) the Rate Change Point proposed to exist in fission yeast, and (c) the proposal that a large number of genes are expressed in a cell-cycle-dependent manner.
Fleck proposed that scientific ideas become fixed and difficult to change because criticisms of current and dominant models are either ignored or turned to support of the current model. The idea of a thought-collective leading to the stability of scientific ideas is a central theme of the theory of Ludwik Fleck.

Even though the use of open preprint databases for scholarly publications is commonplace in several disciplines, their possibilities remain largely unexplored in the humanities. This article examines the emergence and the dynamics of academic preprint and evaluates the possibilities for introducing preprint for the humanities.

The article discuses the Bill of 23 March 2017 of the “Directive of the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Republic of Poland, dated ………… 2017”. It indicates serious flaws of this Bill regarding legislation and the science of science (including bibliometrics), and proposes significant amendments to the content of the provisions of this Directive.

The article disscuses a set of texts dedicated to the Lvovian microbiologist and theorist of science knowledge – Ludwik Fleck. The article presents the main theses of the texts, taking a substantive and sometimes polemical stance on them.

A number of publications devoted to Jan Heweliusz have been published between 2011 and 2016. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his birthday celebrated in 2011, four books have been published gathering the conferences and lectures, with a great deal of foreign authors presenting various aspects of the Gdańsk astronomer’s activities and achievements. In 2014, the publishing of Hevelius’s correspondence was initiated with the volume Prologomena.
This article critically discusses the mentioned publications, pointing out their advantages and shortcomings.
The preliminary study of the volume by Chantal Grell was also published in a Polish translation as a separate book. The author has indeed – more precisely than her predecessors – presented the years of Hevelius’s studies and the network of his correspondents, however overly emphasized his polemics with the French and English scholars. Her final conclusion, qualifying Hevelius as an amateur isolated from the leading currents of the seventeenth century, is contradictory to the evidence of his correspondence, which will be published over the next years.
 

“Intellectuals and the First World War: Central European Perspective”, a conference organized on October 20–22, 2016 in Kraków, was a perfect opportunity to discuss the phenomenon of the 1914–1918 conflict and its impact on the lives of intellectuals and the creators of culture. Many important scientific studies or cultural activities were interrupted by the war as a result of the conscription of the intellectuals and their death either on the WW1 fronts or as civilian victims. On the other hand, the war was also an opportunity for many to redirect professional careers in new directions e.g. in the service of military propaganda. The conference was organized by the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University with the financial support of the Kraków City Council – City of Kraków. The conference brought together nearly 30 speakers from the European Union and the United States of America.

The article contains short information about the international conference on the history of world calendars and calendar making. The conference was organized to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the birth of KIM Dam (1416–1464), a leading Korean astronomer and calendar scholar. The papers presented at the conference included the interactions among different cultures and regions, and the contributions of astronomers to calendar making.

The report discusses the activities of the Commission on the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016/2017. It presents the lists of: scientific meeting, conferences, and new publications.

The report discusses the activities of the Commission on the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016/2017. It presents the lists of: scientific meeting, conferences, and new publications.