108. Scholarly Communication and Its Infrastructures
Asura Enkhbayar, Simon Fraser Univeristy; Timothy Weil Elfenbein, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructure for Monographs (COPIM)
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
We are living in an era that has produced a profusion of new knowledge about the scholarly communication landscape: of what kinds of scholars publish in what kinds of venues; of the consolidation of the publishing and information analytics sector; and of the extent of the literature shifting to open access. And yet, we still have very little knowledge about the daily work of publishers and other intermediaries. Science studies differentiated itself from an earlier sociology of science, in part, by focusing on the everyday embodied work of producing science, embedded in object-filled spaces, with practical repertoires and flexible interpretive logics. Studies of scholarly communication have yet to embrace this turn toward everyday work, instead preferring distanced analysis of the publishing system’s inputs and outputs over labor, work process, and artifactually mediated interaction. What understandings of publishing might emerge from a shift toward a labor and process view of scholarly communication at large?
We particularly want to hear from those engaged in ongoing work on publishing infrastructure, at the articulation point of technology, scholarly practice, and representational form: for instance, work on metadata systems; annotation layers; software and code sharing; dataset and document versioning; datafication and analysis of text; modes of linking disparate digital objects into coherent research projects; modes of decomposing, recomposing, and augmenting existing scholarship. Those working at the edges of the scholarly communication ecology, rethinking the genres, forms, or emplacements of scholarship, are also well positioned to reflect on the mediation of knowledge.
