The End of Exchange

Vollständiger Abstract

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In the course of a few decades around 1970, the circulation of scientific publications changed from a system of exchange—between libraries, publishers, institutions—to one of commercial transactions. In this paper, I will discuss this fundamental change in terms of a shifting moral economy, where the roles, relations, and responsibilities of actors involved in scientific publication were redefined. I focus specifically on the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council (NSRC) as a prime mover in this self-described “rationalization” process, and on the research libraries engaged in publication exchange. The powerful position of the NSRC as a funding agency in the precarious Swedish scientific publication market makes it a particularly illustrative example of changes in higher education and research that were taking place—although at different levels of speed, scale, and breadth—across many countries, languages, and disciplines. The case of the NSRC and publication exchange enables us to examine these changes not merely in terms of scale, but in terms of values.