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Can someone please explain to me the social/economic/historical basis of academic publishing, maybe in the way Jaron Lanier might?
by javajosh 11y ago
Can someone please explain to me the social/economic/historical basis of academic publishing, maybe in the way Jaron Lanier might?
- hugh4 11y agoI don't know who that is. As far as I know the first journal was the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, but certainly that was the model that dominated for centuries. Makes perfect sense, in an 18th century context.
- dredmorbius 11y agoThat's an interesting suggestion. A few bits that I'm aware of. There's a Randall Munroe comic (not published on xkcd) which shows the growth in academic publishing. As with many of his infographic strips, this one is stunningly effective at conveying quantity: http://m.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/infographic.jpg http://m.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/infographic.jpg Much of the growth in publishing followed the explicit formulation that science and technology were the path to an endless frontier, explicitly stated in Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, "Science, the Endless Frontier", and accelerating through the Sputnik crisis, space race, and expanded academic funding of the 1960s-1980s. By the end of that period, academic research was increasingly privately funded and seen as a profit center for large research institutions. https://archive.org/details/scienceendlessfr00unit https://archive.org/details/scienceendlessfr00unit