Now, what I find absolutely horrendous and directly unethical is that all this denigrates the scholarly book, the research monograph. The way I was raised into academia, this was what you meant by research, and now a bunch of foreign bureaucrats with language problems are saying that this does not count? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Writing a journal article, to me, is mainly an exercise in typing. There are rote formulas to get a journal article done (well known such, looking at the shite that gets published), and it frankly bores me a lot of the time. A book, however, is another matter. A book takes time to craft, and the sheer length thereof forces one to work in an altogether different manner.
Alf Rehn has interesting things to say on how the system evaluates scholarly performance.
Interesting seminar coming up at the Niels Bohr archive, unfortunately it collides with the end of term ceremony at the kids’ school:
Niels Bohr Archive
History of Science Seminar
Friday 21 December 2007, 11.15am
Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute
Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen
Steven Shapin
Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science
Harvard University
“Science and the Modern World”
Abstract:
Do we live in a scientific world? At least since Max Weber in 1918 announced the “disenchantment” of the world, social and cultural commentators have insisted, or assumed, that we do. This lecture will assess some very substantial senses in which science is now the defining and most authoritative form of knowledge, and has been since perhaps the late nineteenth century. And it will point to a series of considerations which argue that we do not now, and never have, inhabited a scientific culture. Connections will be pointed out between this problematic state of affairs and the changing identity of the scientist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Spontaneous generations is a new peer reviewed open access STS/HSTM journal. The first issue has opinion pieces, for example one by fellow STS blogger Sage Ross arguing for us scholars to use wikipedia for outreach; papers, including a substantial special section on scientific expertise; and reviews.
This could be the start of something important.
One critical comment, though. While I find the use of Open Access publishing laudable in general, not the least because it makes scholarship visible beyond the walls of (rather expensive) subscription rates (when did you last see a copy of Isis or Social studies of science in, for example, a school library?), it is arguable that the format chosen by Spontaneous generations is a bit too traditional.
Just a simple addition of trackback technologies could add a whole layer of distributed commenting, linking the journal with the academic blogosphere. I think this would substantially increase visibility of the journal. For an example, take a look at the dynamically updated page of sites that link to papers in the physics OA arXiv.org.
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