The shift towards the use of electronic media in scholarly communication appears to be an inescapable imperative. However, these shifts are uneven, both with respect to field and with respect to the form of communication. Different scientific fields have developed and use distinctly different communicative forums, both in the paper and electronic arenas, and these forums play different communicative roles within the field. One common claim is that we are in the early stages of an electronic revolution, that it is only a matter of time before other fields catch up with the early adopters, and that all fields converge on a stable set of electronic forums. A social shaping of technology (SST) perspective helps us to identify important social forces—centered around disciplinary constructions of trust and of legitimate communication—that pull against convergence. This analysis concludes that communicative plurality and communicative heterogeneity are durable features of the scholarly landscape, and that we are likely to see field differences in the use of and meaning ascribed to communications forums persist, even as overall use of electronic communications technologies both in science and in society as a whole increases.
In this article, we examine the conceptual models that help us understand the development and sustainability of scholarly and professional communication forums on the Internet, such as conferences, pre-print servers, field-wide data sets, and collaboratories. We first present and document the information processing model that is implicitly advanced in most discussions about scholarly communications-the "Standard Model." Then we present an alternative model, one that considers information technologies as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs). STIN models provide a richer understanding of human behavior with online scholarly communications forums. They also help to further a more complete understanding of the conditions and activities that support the sustainability of these forums within a field than does the Standard Model. We illustrate the significance of STIN models with examples of scholarly communication forums drawn from the fields of high-energy physics, molecular biology, and information systems. The article also includes a method for modeling electronic forums as STINs.
Electronic publishing opportunities, manifested today in a variety of electronic journals and Web‐based compendia, have captured the imagination of many scholars. These opportunities have also destabilized norms about the character of legitimate scholarly publishing in some fields. Unfortunately, much of the literature about scholarly e‐publishing homogenizes the character of publishing. This article provides an analytical approach for evaluating disciplinary conventions and for proposing policies about scholarly e‐publishing. We characterize three dimensions of scholarly publishing as a communicative practice—publicity, access, and trustworthiness—and examine several forms of paper and electronic publications in this framework. This analysis shows how the common claim that e‐publishing “substantially expands access” is oversimplified. It also indicates how peer reviewing (whether in paper or electronically) provides valuable functions for scholarly communication that are not effectively replaced by self‐posting articles in electronic media.
Many librarians and scholars believe that the Internet can be used to dramatically improve scholarly communication. During the last decade there has been substantial discussion of five major publishing models where readers could access articles without a fee: electronic journals, hybrid paper‐electronic journals, authors' self‐posting on web sites, free online access to all peer reviewed literature, and disciplinary repositories where authors post their own unrefereed articles. There have been numerous projects within each of these models, as well as extensive discussions about their strengths and limitations. While some of these projects have become important scholarly resources in specific disciplines; none of them has become commonplace across numerous disciplines. There is a sixth model that has been quietly adopted and developed in a number of disciplines – the research publication series called working papers or technical reports that are sponsored by academic departments or research institutes. Many of these manuscript series are available to readers, online, and free of charge. This model – which we call Guild Publishing – has a distinct set of advantages and limitations when compared with the other five publishing models. This article explains the Guild Publishing Model, provides some examples, and discusses its strengths and limitations.
The potential significance of the World Wide Web for science and scholarship is analysed from informational, communication, and behavioural perspectives. Key factors to be taken into account are (i) scale, (ii) cost, (iii) conviviality, (iv) community, and (v) legitimacy. It is argued that the Web will have a transformative effect on the way scientists and scholars access information and present the results of their research to globally distributed peer communities
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