The Political Economy of Scientific Publishing and Knowledge Generation

The infrastructure through which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and distributed was built by specific people, with specific interests, in a specific historical moment. It did not arrive fully formed, and it was not designed by the researchers who now work inside it.

This position takes up part of that history. The work is to establish how one piece of the system came to be the way it is, and what followed from it. The point is orientation: what someone working inside the current arrangement, or trying to build something else, would need to know about how it was assembled.

What we are looking for is the question you would pursue and how you would go about it.

Scientific publishing in its current form is roughly seventy years old. Over that period, journals moved from a service run by learned societies to a high-margin commercial product; citation counting moved from a finding aid to an instrument of governance over careers and funding; and a fragmented market consolidated into a handful of firms selling bundled subscriptions back to the institutions that produced the research.

Each of those shifts is documented, and each had identifiable architects and identifiable consequences. Taken together they shape what gets researched, what counts as a contribution, who can read it, and which disciplines can talk to each other.

Three directions we already have material on:

Commercialization. Robert Maxwell and Pergamon Press, from the 1940s to 1991, and the transformation of the journal from a society service into a business with margins to defend.

Metrification. Eugene Garfield, the Science Citation Index, and the Journal Impact Factor. A tool built to help researchers find each other's work became a mechanism for governing their careers.

Consolidation and lock-in. The period from 1991 to the present: the Big Five, the bundled subscription, and how the current arrangement sustains itself.

A proposal may take one of these, or bring another that fits the scope below. Journal proliferation and disciplinary fragmentation is one such direction. So are the open access, preprint, and community-led publishing efforts that have tried to route around the system.

Graduate students, and undergraduates who can show real interest or ability in historical analysis. Backgrounds in history of science, science and technology studies, library and information science, economics, or media history are all relevant, and no single one is required. Comfort working from primary sources and archival material is the strongest signal for this position.

A proposal of 500 to 1000 words covering four things:

1. The question and the claim. What you would work on, and what a claim about it would look like that you could actually be wrong about.
2. Your approach. What sources you would use and what you would do first to find out whether the question is tractable at all.
3. A timeline for the term, from mid-September to the first week of December, in three or four phases rather than week by week, with a midpoint you could be held to.
4. What you want from the term, including whether you would want to work closely with Jesse Parent or run more independently.

Also submit a CV. A letter of recommendation is optional and there is a slot for one. Not including a letter will not count against your proposal.

These positions are unpaid. We do not offer stipends.

We will work with your university to arrange experiential learning or internship credit where your program allows it, and we welcome applicants who bring their own funding or fellowship support. If either applies to you, say so in your proposal and we will work out the arrangement.

We read for whether the claim is genuinely arguable, whether the scope is achievable within the term, whether the approach shows real familiarity with the material, and whether your own interest in the question is legible.

Every proposal is read in full by a person. Nothing in this process runs through keyword matching, automated ranking, or AI screening of any kind, and there are no recorded interviews without a person present. If we interview you, you will be talking with someone who can answer your questions.