Open access in STS

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.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Open access in STS

  1. Pingback: Open and International ISI? « Projectories

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>