MacDonald (2022) Imagining networked scholarly communication: self-archiving, academic labour, and the early internet

Abstract

This essay explores the emergence of self-archiving practices in the 1990s as a form of academic labour that is intimately tied to the popularisation of the Internet. It argues that self-archiving is part of a sociotechnical imaginary of networked scholarly communication that has helped to shape understandings of digital scholarship and dissemination over the past three decades. Focussing on influential texts written by open access archivangelist Stevan Harnad in 1990 and 1994, the essay analyzes the language and discursive strategies used to promote self-archiving as form of collective scholarly exchange. Through these writings, Harnad helped to articulate scholars to the Internet as a medium of publication, with impacts still seen today in policy discussions around open access and the public good that shape relations of knowledge production under contemporary forms of capitalism.