Scholarly publishing is an essential vehicle for actively participating in the scientific debate and for sustaining the invisible colleges of the modern research environment, which extend far beyond the borders of individual research institutions. However, its current dynamics have deeply transformed the scientific life and conditioned in new ways the economics of academic knowledge production. They have also challenged the perceived common sense view of scientific research. Method: Analytical approach to set out a comprehensive framework on the current debate on scholarly publishing and to shed light on the peculiar organization and the working of this peculiar productive sector. Result: The way in which scientific knowledge is produced and transmitted has been dramatically affected by the series of recent major technosocietal transformations. Although the effects are many, in particular the current overlap and interplay between two distinct and somewhat opposite stances—scientific and economic—tend to blur the overall understanding of what scholarly publishing is and produces distortion on its working which in turn affect the scientific activities. The outcome is thus a series of intended and unintended effects on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Conclusion: The article suggests that a substantial transformation characterizes science today that seems more like a thrusting, entrepreneurial business than a contemplative, disinterested endeavor. In this essay, we provide a general overview of the pivotal role of the scholarly publishing in fostering this change and its pros and cons connected to the idiosyncratic interplay between social norms and market stances.
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Technology Innovation Management Review
After 350 years of operation, the academic journal publishing industry is imbalanced and in flux as a result of the impacts of Internet technology which has led, over the past 20 years, to the rise of open access publishing. The introduction of open access journals, in the opinion of many researchers, is considered to be a case of disruptive innovation which is revolutionizing the industry. This article analyzes the traditional journal publishing system, the recent open access models of journal publishing as an evolving phenomenon, the nature and extent of open access as a disruptive innovation, and the implications for key stakeholders. The major finding is that, digitalization has empowered open access publishing through reduction in costs, easier use, and speedier production processes, but is not yet a serious threat to traditional publishers because of strategies employed by the major publishers and slow adoption of open access by non-science researchers.
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Since the Second World War, academic publishing practices have had to cope with enormous changes in the scale of the research enterprise, in the culture and management of higher education, and in the ecosystem of scholarly publishers. The pace of change has been particularly rapid in the last twenty-five years, thanks to digital technologies. This has also been a time of growing divergence between the different roles of academic publishing: as a means of disseminating validated knowledge, as a form of symbolic capital for academic career progression, and as a profitable business enterprise. This briefing paper aims to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the future of academic publishing should look like. We argue that current policy regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communi.
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The formal scientific communication system is currently undergoing significant change. This is due to four developments: the digitisation of formal science communication; the economisation of academic publishing as profit drives many academic publishers and other providers of information; an increase in the self-observation of science by means of publication, citation and utility-based indicators; and the medialisation of science as its observation by the mass media intensifies. Previously, these developments have only been dealt with individually in the literature and by science-policy actors. The Future of Scholarly Publishing documents the materials and results of an interdisciplinary working group commissioned by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) to analyse the future of scholarly publishing and to make recommendations on how to respond to the challenges posed by these developments.As per the working groups intention, the focus was mainly on the sc.
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The Cambridge Law Journal
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Scholarly and particularly journal publishing seems to be a classic case of path dependence (David, 1985: 332). I suggest the core issue is whether commercial academic journals are like the qwerty keyboard in persisting long after their rationale ends, or whether they are more like print newspapers, which seem to being displaced by electronic newsletters. I conjecture that the interwebs are changing not only publishing but also the way that scholars conceive, do and communicate research. If this turns out to be true the long and possibly medium future is with institutions’ digital repositories, as Harnard (2012a, b) argues.
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