ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Exporting Publishing Standards / Negotiating “Scientific Information”

• In Event: The Local and the Global in Scientific Information

English Abstract

How were formats and procedures for scientific publishing exported as purported global standards? This paper will follow one factor in the narrowing of the journal format the rise in the 1960s of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and its suite of bibliographical products. Starting in 1970, its founder, Eugene Garfield, decided to pursue a strategy to turn ISI into a global purveyor of scientific information, following the model of what IBM had done for computers. He spent a significant portion of each year traveling the world to market his company’s products. Many of these trips involved informal negotiations about including certain publications in ISI’s indexes alongside his promoting particular formats and practices as conditions of inclusion. As publishing metrics came to prominence, strongly associated with ISI, these conditions became a source of significant controversy. The extensive archival record of Garfield’s trips, and his correspondence with advocates of ‘science in developing countries’, provide insight into how standards such as ‘peer review’ were exported beyond the USA and Britain.

Author

• Alex Csiszar, Harvard University