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