Reassembling Scholarly Communications

Abstract

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. The contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the Open Society Foundations, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Knowledge Unlatched, and Birkbeck, University of London.

The voices of medical education scholarship: Describing the published landscape

“…publishers, editors, peer reviewers) should exercise ‘responsible agency’. 52 As described by Jose Medina, responsible agency requires that the individuals in power recognise their position within a system of privilege and oppression. 53 To this end, several journals have recently undertaken initiatives to act as responsible agents.…”

Challenges of Open Science: Problems of Metadata Research and Analysis of Scientometric Indicators of Scientists (Experience of the Scientific Library of Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University)

“…The continuous development of open science requires innovative decisions, which are based on modern research of the international scientific community, namely: 1) open access (Schöpfel et al, 2023;Holley, 2018;Eve & Gray, 2020) and open science (Center for Open Science, n.d.), its promotion (Boyack, Smith, & Klavans, 2020); 2) definition of the concept of metadata (Qin & Zeng, 2022) and management of metadata (Metascience, 2023); 3) roles of universities (Robinson-Garcia, Costas, & van Leeuwen, 2020), repositories and the importance of academic libraries in the promotion of knowledge in relevant areas (Khosrow-Pour, 2019;Lo, Cho, Chiu, & Allard, 2019;Information Resources Management Association, 2020).…”