Communication Regimes in Competition

Abstract

Recent advances in information technology have enabled new ways of communicating research reports. A significant innovation in this area is that of 'eprint' archives: online repositories in which researchers make their papers freely available to their colleagues. This practice, which is known as self-archiving, poses a serious challenge to traditional academic journals. Publishers have responded with several strategies for remodelling journals in order to make them more attractive to authors and readers. New services, products and initiatives are constantly being launched in this market, and the outcome of the present disruption is uncertain. The present paper employs the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) methodology to analyse the current transformation in scholarly communication. The analysis defines the functions long served by academic publishing, examines the extent to which newly introduced technologies fulfil these functions and explains the dynamics of the stabilization process now underway. A key element of the analysis is the principle of interpretative flexibility. In the present case, interpretative flexibility brings into relief disciplinary variation in the needs and interests of potential users.The extent to which scientific knowledge reflects the specific social and historical circumstances surrounding its construction has long been the subject of acrimonious debate, but there is general consensus that science is a social activity in the sense that those engaged in it do not work in isolation from their colleagues. Practitioners of all disciplines communicate intensively with one another using a variety of forms. An elementary distinction for categorizing such communication is between formal and informal modes. Informal communication includes information exchanged via telephone, fax, letters and email, as well as in face-to-face interaction at seminars and conferences. Formal communication, by contrast, refers to published research.

Changing styles of informal academic communication in the age of the web

“…1-Scholarly publishing, for example, was exposed to many changes because of the integration of new technologies. Early studies thought that the Internet will change publishing, providing academia with great potential for becoming the leading publishing platform, which was considered a threat to the existence of the traditional publishers (Oppenheim et al, 2000;Borgman, 2000;Bohlin, 2004;Rowlands et al, 2004;Waltham, 2010;Cope and Phillips, 2014). The adoption of information technologies brought huge optimism among scholars, as it was found to increase researchers' productivity and publications (Hesse et al, 1993;Cohen, 1996;Kaminer and Braunstein, 1998;Walsh et al, 2000).…”

The changing forms and expectations of peer review

“…Subsequently, the actual review is done by community members who comment on the manuscript, either via personal or public communication. Authors can then improve the manuscript and upload new versions to the archive [ 14 , 50 ]. Originating in physics, astronomy and mathematics, the preprint servers have found their way to other scientific disciplines, with similar servers set up for biology, engineering and psychology [ 110 ].…”

“…This fast dissemination method allows scholars to keep up with each other’s work, provides a way of crediting the first author(s) for presenting novel findings and thereby solving priority issues, and allows readers to comment on early drafts of a paper. Ideally, this results in exchanging ideas and improving the manuscript [ 14 , 50 ]. However, despite an increased number of papers being deposited in arXiv and other preprint servers, the proportion of scientific literature made available in this fashion is still very low and limited to only a few academic fields [ 112 ].…”

Peer Review: Readers in the Making of Scholarly Knowledge

“…Indeed, after the establishment of the arXiv high-energy physics repository at the beginning of the 1990s, many scientific milieus and institutions acquired repository servers to host working papers. 23 Ideally, these manuscripts are preliminary versions submitted for criticism and comments by specialist groups that are notified of the submissions. The resulting exchanges are managed by the system, which archives the different versions produced.…”