2 The Transformation of the Scientific Paper: From Knowledge to Accounting Unit

Since the mid-1990s, observers and actors in the scientific field—as defined in Bourdieu (1986, 2004) as a structured space of agents and institutions in competition for the accumulation of credit or “symbolic capital”—have commented on the many facets of an ongoing major transformation in the structural conditions of scientific practice: massification of research, mounting pressure to publish, relative decline of government investments, and the arrival into the research system of the ideology of “knowledge management” with its insistence on quantitative evaluation measures of productivity and “impact” of academic research (Bruneau and Savage, 2002). As discussed by many contributions to this book, these transformations of the research system led actors to respond with various strategies of “gaming” the system through manipulating the metrics to attain the required results or, as suggested by Griesemer in his contribution, to try to derail the whole enterprise of metrics, though it is not clear how one could do that. By the end of the twentieth century, the technical infrastructure of journal publishing had also started to be radically transformed through the use of internet and electronic publishing (Thompson, 2005). These new technologies of communications made it possible to skip the materiality of the scientific paper and directly produce digital papers and journals that could then circulate much faster and globally on the internet, in turn contributing to transforming the dynamic of scientific practice. Finally, the mounting concentration of scientific journals in the hands of a limited number of giant publishing firms submitted to an increasing demand of profitability on the stock exchange, engendered in the mid-1990s what has been called a “crisis in scholarly publishing” due to the mounting price of journal subscription for academic libraries (Thatcher, 1995; Tenopir and King, 1997; McGuigan and Russell, 2008; Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, 2015). An answer to that crisis has been the emergence of the “open-access” movement (Laakso et al., 2011). The combination of internet technology and the profitability of academic journals, which could now be born digitally, gave rise to the multiplication of specialist journals, many considered of dubious quality, trying to capture a part of the value generated in answering the “offer” of more papers being produced by researchers answering the “publish or perish” injunction from their institutions. Finally, internet diffusion of papers in open access made results more easily accessible to new nonspecialist audiences who could in return influence choices and priorities of research.