Science in Formation: The Indexed Scientist and the Inaccessibility of Scientific Information

Abstract

What is inhibiting access to scientific information? The treatment of scientists is comparable to the treatment of scientific information; they are both bureaucratically processed by means of quantifiable metrics and indices. The symbolic form that represents substance is as important as substance itself. Scientists have to index themselves within the body of knowledge, instead of vice versa; knowledge itself is without authorship. This employment of metrics and indices has made authorship an objective on its own; it requires publishing for the published name, instead of publishing as a communicative means. This, in return, is foundational for the inaccessibility of scientific information.In this chapter, we will reconstruct this shift of means and ends. To do so, we need to start with the information and see how it is being treated to conform to the form of the publication and how it becomes enclosed with meta data (section A). In the following two sections, we will turn towards economic criteria, specifically the low price elasticity of demand that seems to explain science’s serials crisis (B), and how open access to scientific publications failed as a solution for liberating scientific information (C). We will arrive at a utopian technological determinism towards making scientific information more accessible which is inhibited by our social practices.