While recent scholarship on the history of science publishing has focused on scientific journals, self-confessed ‘journal publishers’ only came into being in the latter half of the 20th century. This poses the question how this shift towards periodicals as core products was brought about: What other formats were publishers invested in and how did these formats relate to periodical publishing? This talk explores publishers’ perspectives on scientific publication formats in the mid-20th century as mediated by one particular publishing adviser who worked for several publishers such as North-Holland in the Netherlands, Interscience in the U.S., Oxford University Press and Pergamon Press in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. Publishers’ activities focused, as I argue in my dissertation, on periodical formats, which could include journals as well as textbooks and handbooks, even if these are not commonly associated with periodical publishing today. Rather than merely focus on printed publications, scientific communication strategies in the mid-20th century highlighted personal interaction and stressed the benefits of smaller conferences. In my talk, I will discuss the features of the Rochester Conferences on High-Energy Nuclear Physics as one example of an “élitist conference,” the organizers’ programmatic objects at the very outset, and their cooperation with Interscience Publishers from 1952 onwards.