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Modern scientific research has changed so much since Isaac Newton’s day: it is more professional, collaborative and international, with more complicated equipment and a more diverse community of researchers. Yet the use of scientific journals to report, share and store results is a thread that runs through the history of science from Newton’s day to ours. Scientific journals are now central to academic research and careers. Their editorial and peer-review processes act as a check on new claims and findings, and researchers build their careers on the list of journal articles they have published. The journal that reported Newton’s optical experiments still exists. First published in 1665...
This book analyzes the various economic and marketing strategies utilized by the five major STM commercial scholarly journal publishers since 2000. This period has witnessed tremendous economic, marketing, and technological growth including the migration from a print only to a hybrid publishing format. With this growth, the industry has also seen the rise of open access publishing, copyright challenges by websites such as Sci-Hub, the emergence of sharing platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, as well as the impact of Plan S on publishers, universities, and authors. Given this incredible rate of change across the industry, the author explores the diverse strategies and structures c...
“What do we want? Evidence-based science! When do we want it? After peer review!” We have come to think of peer review as the stamp of quality that separates real results from mere conjecture, but a look under the hood reveals that the participants inside of peer review are far from objective. This book reclaims subjectivity and affirms a social mode of objectivity, which prevents peer review from overpromising and underdelivering in its vital role in knowledge production.
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars. Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field
A comprehensive proposal for reforming copyright law to ensure sustainable public access to research and scholarship. Open access is widely supported by researchers, librarians, scholarly societies, and research funders, as well as large and small publishers. Yet despite this support—and the pandemic’s demonstration of the importance of open access for scientific progress—the scholarly publishing market is failing to deliver open access quickly enough. In Copyright’s Broken Promise, John Willinsky presents the case for reforming copyright law so that it supports, rather than impedes, public access to research and scholarship. He draws on the legal strategy of statutory licensing to s...
The Discourse of Scholarly Communication examines the place and purpose of modern scholarship and its dialectical relationship with the ethos of Enlightenment. Patrick Gamsby argues that while Enlightenment/enlightenment is often used in the mottos of numerous academic institutions, its historical, social, and philosophical elements are largely obscured. Using a theoretical lens, Gamsby revisits the ideals of the Enlightenment alongside the often-contradictory issues of disciplinary boundaries, access to research, academic labor in the production of scholarship (author, peer reviewer, editor, and translator), the interrelationship of form and content (lectures, textbooks, books, and essays), and the stewardship of scholarship in academic libraries and archives. It is ultimately argued that for the betterment of the scholarly communication ecosystem and the betterment of society, anti-Enlightenment rules of scholarship such as ‘publish or perish’ should be dispensed with in favor of the formulation of a New Enlightenment.
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life. Writing Embodiment reads nineteenth-...
Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an...
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 fr...
This book illuminates a lesser-known aspect of the British history of travel in the Enlightenment: that of the Royal Society’s special contribution to the “discovery” of the south of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour. By exploring primary source journal entries of philosophy and travel, the book provides evidence of how the Society helped raise the Fellows’ curiosity about the Mediterranean and encouraged travel to the region by promoting cultural events there and establishing fruitful relations with major Italian academic institutions. They were especially devoted to revealing the natural and artistic riches of the Bourbon Kingdom from 1738 to 1780, during which the Roman city of Herculaneum was discovered and Vesuvius and Etna were actively eruptive. Through these examples, the book draws attention to the role that the Royal Society played in establishing cultural networks in Italy and beyond. Tracing a complex path starting in Restoration times, this new insight into discourse on learned travel contributes to a more challenging vision of Anglo-Italian relations in the Enlightenment.