Scholarly Communication from the Middle Ages to the Open Era

Abstract

This course aims to help PhD students place the act of academic publication in historic, cultural and commercial context, with the aim of helping them to act agentively as they build their academic careers.  The course is open to interested PhD students from all disciplines, and draws from texts in history, law, business, the social sciences, and science fiction.   

The university has different professional and informational economies than the commercial sector. For scholars, sharing work for free often accrues more professional capital than ‘selling’ access brings them wealth. While ‘Open’ norms in Science and Publishing are often considered recent innovations, in fact they connect with scholarly traditions that predate copyright, commercial mass media and ‘closed’ culture. 

The modern university emerged from the monasteries of the Middle Ages, where copying texts was a laborious process. By the early 20th century written scholarly exchanges were informal by today’s standards. Public research funding greatly expanded after World War II, and with it a commercial publishing infrastructure for sharing findings, pressure to 'publish or perish', and an emphasis on research evaluation. By the Internet era, however, the system wherein the public funded research, academic publishers databased the ever-expanding mountain of resulting publications, and academic libraries paid for access appeared neither sensible nor economically viable (if indeed, it ever did). In this environment, sharing work ‘openly’ has emerged as a potential solution to make research efficient and distributable for the 21st century.  

While we often think of Open Science as new, it also draws from long-held academic values – and understanding these continuities and innovations can help scholars break to break the ‘publish or perish’ cycle and focus their work where it will have the most impact.