Science communication: Change
challenges existing norms
Madhan M
Library
1000+ People of the Millenium and Beyond
Revolutionary technologies
Metal movable type
Gutenberg's printing press spread literature to
the masses for the first time in an efficient,
durable way, shoving Europe headlong into the
original information age – the Renaissance.
The immediate effect of the printing press was to
multiply the output and cut the costs of books. It
thus made information available to a much larger
segment of the population who were, of course,
eager for information of any variety. Libraries
could now store greater quantities of information
at much lower cost. Printing also facilitated the
dissemination and preservation of knowledge in
standardized form -- this was most important in
the advance of science, technology and
scholarship. The printing press certainly initiated
an "information revolution" on par with the
Internet today. Printing could and did spread new
ideas quickly and with greater impact.
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html
The printing press didn't exactly put monks or scribes
out of work. Monks support their calling in a lot of
different ways, so it isn't like the printing press put them
out of business. In fact, even today at the Benedictine
Abbey of Christ in the Desert some monks still continue
as scribes, though in a new technological medium.
Also, you have to remember that the printing press is
essentially only useful for mass production -- just think
of all the things you handwrite every single day. I think
it's more fair to say that the printing press transformed
the job of the scribe.
http://unlocked-wordhoard.blogspot.in/2011/11/benjamin-and-printing-
press.html
Journals
To claim priority of ideas
Using Gregor Mendel’s pioneering paper
on genetics in 1866, Posner and Skutil3
have traced how 40 reprints of Mendel’s
landmark paper were distributed among
his contemporary scientists in Europe,
and inferred that ‘practically all prominent
biologists of the mid-nineteenth
century had access to Mendel’s paper but
our inquiry as to whether any of them
had consulted it produced no definite
answers’.
George Beadle had opined,
‘We were all taught that Mendel’s classic
paper was lost for a third of a century.
That is not so. It was not lost; it was un-
appreciated…One wonders if Darwin
himself did not get a reprint, for Mendel
was aware of Darwin’s ideas and that his
work provided the basic variability that
so puzzled Darwin. If Darwin did receive
one, or if he read the paper in the
Proceedings of the Brunn Society, which
was sent to more than 120 libraries, he
too was unimpressed.’
• Initially, scientific societies managed journals
•There were a very few societies, hence, very
few journal
• Since around 1940s private firms found
business opportunity in science publishing and
entered in publishing scientific journals
•Access to journals created a big divide
Internet and Web
•Now there are 24,000 scientific
journals publishes 2.4 million
articles every year
•CAB Abstracts indexes articles
from 9000+ journals related to
agriculture and applied medicine
It becomes a compulsion for
scientists publish your
research results in journals
published from Western
Europe and North America
The internet has added
much to existed divide.
The enclosures do continue
Visibility and impact
Mega Journals
• Thanks