The Status of Scientific Publication in the Information Age (original) (raw)

The principal argument of this paper is that existing practices of scientific publishing ill-fit information-oriented sciences which are fundamentally concerned with complexity, constraint, uncertainty and contingency. It is argued that better exploitation of the full gamut of technological possibilities for scientific communication could support a much richer coordination of understanding between scientists. The barriers to achieving this lie with mechanisms of scarcity production in education, which are fundamentally driven by outdated publication practices. The argument builds on the social ontology of Searle, suggesting that scientific publishing declares " status functions " which simultaneously declare scarcity at many levels of education-in the process feeding economic mechanisms within education which have become pathological. In response, I argue that a richer ecology of types of communication by scholars exploiting and experimenting with new technologies can not only mitigate the pathology of publication, but can create better conditions for the advancement of learning and coordination of scientific understanding.

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