Three tales of marketization. The role of publication programs in the entry into an era of articlization in chemistry

Résumé En

My purpose in this poster (which is an output of a PhD dissertation in sociology defended on June 2023) is to examine the conditions for the development of a “publication program” that is not a major technological program but a mundane publication infrastructure in chemistry. By publication infrastructure, I mean the complex set of operations that consists of publishing (i.e. editing, producing and printing) periodicals. I focus on chemistry, a discipline that was (and remains) a “science of the archives” (Daston, 2012), in which exhaustive research through the accumulated achievements of the discipline is often a prerequisite for the acquisition of new knowledge. I'm interested in chemistry journals, which are part of the “international machinery” of chemical information (Hepler-Smith, 2015). Far from considering them as archaic relics from the printing age, I suggest they could have contributed to creating an academic social order and, through the idea of program, acted as an instrument serving the discipline.The poster, which aims to bring together historical and more contemporary approaches, is based on three separate empirical studies. In this work, I make a slight detour via open access policies and do not concentrate on knowledge production but on the conditions of trade of periodicals and propose three tales of marketization. I argue that the current situation is the result of a series of small shifts and coups de force, which, combined with legal provisions governing intellectual property, have favored the irreversible entry into an era of "articlization" (i.e.scientific papers as singular entities) in chemistry.