History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Michael Nentwich
Institute of Technology Assessment, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Vienna
Austria
e-mail: mnent@oeaw.ac.at
(Re-)Decommodification in academic knowledge distribution?
Declining library budgets alongside with sharply increasing prices of academic publications have led to massive restrictions in library purchases, in particular in journal subscriptions. This means that near-comprehensive access to the products of academic knowledge production is no longer guaranteed. The commercial exploitation of academic knowledge by commercial publishers seems, however, to have reached a watershed. Increasing numbers of academics no longer acquiesce this erosion of the foundations of academic communication. Various initiatives aim at ensuring a better functioning of the academic knowledge distribution system in the future. While on the one hand, libraries try to pool their resources and purchasing power in consortia and thus stay within the present paradigm, there are, on the other hand, academics, scholarly associations and libraries setting up free E-print-servers, non-commercial E-journals, free knowledge resources in the WWW and the like. In other words, a parallel infrastructure seems to emancipate itself from strict commercial considerations facilitating various forms of not-for-profit knowledge circulation. Some of them appear to be similar to those preceding the advent of strong commercial interests in the academic publishing market. Others are quite different from the original system due to the new opportunities provided by current information and communication technologies. On this backdrop the paper examines whether we have to expect, in the medium run, a uniform or a split system — partly commodified and partly de-commodified.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006