In today's political climate, we are well aware, if we weren't before, that inequities exist at all levels of society. This is true also in scholarly communications, which despite its many changes in the last few decades, still adheres to traditional values and structures. This talk offers a broad overview of how inequities exist within the traditional values and structures of academic publishing and scholarly communication, as well as some efforts to address these issues.
In today's political climate, we are well aware, if we weren't before, that inequities exist at all levels of society. This is true also in scholarly communications, which despite its many changes in the last few decades, still adheres to traditional values and structures. This talk offers a broad overview of how inequities exist within the traditional values and structures of academic publishing and scholarly communication, as well as some efforts to address these issues.
Scholarly communication is shaped in a social context everywhere; therefore, it may be affected by many factors, and it does not form in the same pattern in all parts of the world. While the primary nature and function of scholarly communication has remained unchanged for centuries, it differs by culture, countries, religion, attitude, and social context. The purpose of the article is to review how scholarly communication is being shaped in Iran. The article highlights the differences between scholarly communication in Iran and in Western countries by considering the relevant historical, religious, cultural, social, and political factors and their impact on scholarly communication.
Much has been written lately on disinformation, particularly regarding right-wing extremism and COVID-19. Few attempts, however, have been made to classify specific forms of disinformation, and little attention has been paid to disinformation's impact on scholarly communications. This essay identifies three types of disinformation affecting academic publishing based on authorial intent: parodic, which critiques the scholarly process through mimicry and humour; opportunist, which seeks to promote the author's scholarly image; and malicious, which distorts the reader's perception of a controversial issue like vaccination or climate change. In doing so, the paper provides an overview of notable instances of published disinformation, such as the Sokal affair, while highlighting the current threat of pandemic-related disinformation posing as scholarly research. The malicious disinformation section also explores how academic and pseudoscientific parlance can be adopted by white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. This paper demonstrates that a taxonomic approach to published disinformation can simultaneously make identifying falsified academic research easier, while exposing vulnerabilities in the publishing system. Furthermore, it also attempts to raise awareness of published disinformation as not just a problem confined to academia, but rather a contributor to the ongoing 'culture wars' and a potential threat to both public health and national security.
The rise of disciplines is connected with the formation of groups or networks of specialists. It is connected with the emergence of "scientific communities," theorized about since Thomas Kuhn and Robert Merton. But how is such a community of specialists brought together; how are common orientations among members of a scientific community upheld? In this article it is argued that scholarly journals play a key role in the modern scientific disciplines. Journals both secure the shared values of a scientific community and endorse what that community takes to be certified knowledge. Publications in scholarly journals have become the basic units of scientific communication in a discipline. Against this theoretical background, I analyze in this article the evolution of the leading scholarly journal in the field of education in the Dutch-language community,Paedagogische Studiën (Studies in Education). The analyses illuminate a number of historical evolutions in this journal in the period 1920–75: the increase in coauthorship and the concomitant standardization of publication formats; the changing role of the editorial board, especially in its function of gatekeeper of scientific communication; and the increase and the shifting "global" nature of cited work in the journal. Because of the close relationship between journal and discipline, this analysis highlights basic characteristics of the patterns of communication and the constitution of disciplinary identity in Dutch-language educational science.
Only a few studies in communication research have focused on bibliometrics or scholarly communication per se, but these concepts are closely tied to strong traditions of communication research in content analysis and organizational communication. Bibliometric studies are becoming common in several fields of science because of the number and accessibility of electronic databases as well as the development of conceptual frameworks in which bibliometric measures are indicative of social processes such as the evolution of scientific specialties and the diffusion of innovations. Research on scholarly communication, and more narrowly on scientific communication, is receiving growing attention because of the problems and costs of disseminating information to scientists, practitioners, and policymakers. With its focus on informal and formal communication processes, this research clearly falls within the province of communication research. However, many of the studies have been conducted by information scientists with a practical need to improve scientific information systems. Communication researchers are beginning to apply bibliometric methods to topics ranging from political communication to the new media. Bibliometrics and the study of scholarly communication present an opportunity for communication researchers and information scientists to collaborate in an area of common interest.
Any paper describing new developments in open access policies and mandates risks being out-of-date almost before it is finished. New policies from governments, research funding bodies, and individual institutions around the world are announced weekly. This paper attempts to describe some of the most recent and important policies and mandates, and puts these policies into the context of wider social pressures on scholarly communication. Finally, the papers attempts to sketch some of the ways in which the library community can react to the changing scholarly communication environment.
The objective of the meeting was to identify concrete ways for implementing proposals to foster the international scientific co-operation of universities and academic societies. Against the background of an assumed tendency towards knowledge monopolies, caused by the protection of intellectual property rights by a few publishers, the experts in the Conference discussed the potential of these academic e-presses for improving scientific article collection and treatment as well as facilitating the access to scientific knowledge. The papers in this volume can best be regarded as contributions to the areas of inquiry in a field that is continuing to change very rapidly. - The objective of the meeting was to identify concrete ways for implementing proposals to foster the international scientific co-operation of universities and academic societies. Against the background of an assumed tendency towards knowledge monopolies, caused by the protection of intellectual property rights by a few publishers, the experts in the Conference discussed the potential of these academic e-presses for improving scientific article collection and treatment as well as facilitating the access to scientific knowledge. The papers in this volume can best be regarded as contributions to the areas of inquiry in a field that is continuing to change very rapidly.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest both in scholarly communication as a research area and in the application of bibliometrics as a research method. This special issue attempts to review current research that applies bibliometric techniques to research questions in scholarly communication. We consider scholarly communication to be the study of how scholars in any field use and disseminate information through formal and informal channels, whereas bibliometrics is the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication. We propose a matrix for the intersection of these two topics of variables studied (producers, artifacts, and concepts of communication) by research questions asked (characterizing scholarly communities, evolution of scholarly communities, evaluation of scholarly contributions, and the diffusion of ideas). Research in these areas is reviewed, and articles in this issue are set in the context of the matrix. Reliability and validity issues in the application of bibliometrics are reviewed briefly.
