The adoption of electronic methods dominates the modern discussion of the scholarly communication process. What is often overlooked in this discussion, however, is how the scholarly communication process is constructed, with researchers, patrons, and librarians negotiating over how to finance and package the distribution of research findings. The constructed nature of the scholarly communication process calls into question the dominant theme in the literature that all disciplines across all cultures will eventually converge on a common set of scholarly communication practices. It stands to reason that the scholarly communication process is likely to look quite different in a developed country, where networked technology is widely available and where scholars and their patrons see value in their intellectual property, than in a developing country, where networked technology is less prevalent and financial constraints play an outsized role. And while there have been a number of investigations of the use of electronic scholarly communication methods in specific developing countries that address differences in the availability of resources, there has been an absence of discussion of electronic scholarly communication methods in developing countries from the perspective of social shaping of technology where the interaction process across actors and with technology is highlighted. In this article we investigate the constructed nature of the electronic scholarly communication process in Mongolia and identify some of the social and economic forces that are shaping it.
The Social Shaping of the Scholarly Communication System in MongoliaSocial Shaping of the Scholarly Communication System in MongoliaT. Scheiding, B. Yadamsuren, and G. Lkhagva
Thomas Scheiding is an assistant professor of economics and the chair of the business administration program at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His research interests are in the social studies of science in the twentieth century. His focus specifically is on how the research infrastructure in a country and in a discipline is the result of contested negotiations among scholars, research administrators, and librarians. His future research interests remain centered on changes to the academic infrastructure in Mongolia and specifically on how the discipline of economics has changed in an environment of wider economic and social changes.
Borchuluun Yadamsuren is a researcher of user experience at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies of the University of Missouri. Her research focus is information behavior of different user groups in information-seeking contexts of everyday life, serendipitous information discovery, and scholarly communication. With her ongoing research in scholarly communication, she aims to explore obstacles that scholars in developing countries face in order to participate in global scholarly communication processes and what needs to be done to overcome these challenges.
Gantulga Lkhagva is the executive director of the Mongolian Libraries Consortium, a nongovernment organization that is responsible for e-resources license negotiations, open access resources development, and building local capacity in Mongolia. He is country coordinator of the EIFL and INASP. His research interests are in open access, library science, and bibliometric analysis. His focus specifically centers on conducting bibliometric analysis for Mongolian researchers and the role played by open access and the development of institutional repositories in Mongolia.
Thomas Scheiding, Borchuluun Yadamsuren, Gantulga Lkhagva; The Social Shaping of the Scholarly Communication System in Mongolia
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