Open Access

Reassembling Scholarly CommunicationsHistories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/Reassembling-Scholarly-CommunicationsHistories

Chapter 7. Peer Review: Readers in the Making of Scholarly Knowledge
David Pontille and Didier Torny

p. 120

If open science has become a motto, it encompasses two different visions for journal peer review. The first one, which includes open identities, takes place within the academic closet, where the dissemination of manuscripts is made possible by small discourse collectives that shape consensual facts.29 This vision is supported by the validation processes designed by Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the Royal Society, who thought that disputes about scientific facts needed a specific and limited “social space” in order to be solved.30 By contrast, following Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan conception of sovereignty, the second vision urges a multiplication of points of view. The disentanglement of peer evaluation cuts through the ability given to readers to comment on published articles, produce social media metrics through the sharing of documents, and observe the whole evaluation process of each manuscript.31 In this vision, scholarly communication relies on a plurality of instances that generate a continuous process of judgment. The first vision has been at the heart of the scientific article as a genre, and a key component of the scientific journal as the most important channel for scholarly communication.32

Chapter 13: Libraries, Museums, and Archives as Speculative Knowledge Infrastructure

Textbook Spending

Textbook Spending Continues Slow Decline

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/25/spending-and-costs-textbooks-continue-decrease-according-surveys
Nick Hazelrigg July 25, 2019

According to the survey of more than 20,000 students across 41 institutions conducted by the National Association of College Stores, students on average spent $415 on course materials in the 2018-19 academic year, down from $484 last year. Student spending has declined almost every year in the last decade — in 2008 students spent an average of $700 on course materials.

An internal survey conducted by the textbook retailer Campusbooks.com found the company’s average textbook prices had fallen 26 percent in the last two years.

Nicole Allen, director of open education at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said the results are consistent with recent trends in the pricing of course materials.