Abstract: In this talk I will present a preliminary framework for analyzing the changing shape of scholarly journals. I start out by reconstructing the birth and stabilization of the Journal of High Energy Physics in the early 1990s, a journal that subsequently became one of the reference publications in its field. By analyzing the emergence of online and open access scholarly publishing I aim at critically reflecting upon contemporary global open access initiatives in physics. In this work I use metaphors drawn from computer science, such as forking, migration, and rebooting, as heuristic concepts for the analysis of digital media evolution. By studying the values and choices of scientists that became adopters and developers of new media technologies, I highlight the power dynamics and resilience of the modern scholarly communication system embodied by the scientific journal.

Alessandro Delfanti is a postdoc with the Innovating Communication in Scholarship project at the University of California, Davis, and is affiliated with the Genome Center and the STS Program. Previously, Alessandro has worked and taught at McGill University and the University of Milan. His work revolves around the politics of digital media, participatory cultures, and science communication. He is the author of Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science (London: Pluto Press 2013).