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Sunday, April 06, 2008

More on the gift economy of scholarly communication

Claudia Koltzenburg, Digital objects as "transducers" in scientific web publishing. International Journal of Feminist Technoscience, May 9, 2007.  A copy was self-archived April 4, 2008.

Abstract:   Scientific web publishing offers an attractive bundle of phenomena for feminist technoscientific investigation. This article focuses on research articles in scientific journals and aims at identifying a range of exclusionary practices in the current publishing system, which need to be critically addressed. For this purpose, the functionalities of digital objects are studied using the analogy of a piezoelectric crystal as a transducer in obstetric ultrasonography [Karen Barad 2001]. This is embedded in the idea that scholarly communication, and publishing in particular, is characterized by an economy based on gift-giving-for-recognition.