Lucía Céspedes

As scholarly publishing becomes increasingly commodified, market-oriented definitions of excellence are reshaping the organization and hierarchization of scientific knowledge. Using a sociology of elites framework, this article examines how the social conditions under which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and circulated shape epistemic inequalities. It focuses on journal editors—who play a central role in defining legitimate knowledge—but remain understudied as holders of scientific and editorial authority. Through the prosopographic and bibliometric analysis of 229 editors from 97 leading biology journals, we investigate whether editorial authority is structured primarily by scientific authority, market-oriented authority, or a combination of both. We examine how editors’ sociodemographic characteristics and scientific, institutional, international, and extra-academic capital relate to journal characteristics and research topics. The findings reveal a dual structure of editorial authority: editors with strong scientific and institutional capital are associated with historically less valued specialties, such as marine biology and animal science. By contrast, younger, often women, professional editors are more frequently associated with commercial journals publishing research on highly marketable topics, such as cancer biology and immunology. The article contributes to the sociology of scientific knowledge by showing that epistemic inequalities are not produced solely through unequal distribution of scientific resources. They also arise through the interaction between scientific and market-oriented forms of authority within the editorial field. The increasing commodification of scholarly publishing therefore reconfigures the principles governing the legitimation and hierarchization of knowledge, while introducing market-based definitions of relevance and excellence alongside—and sometimes in tension with—established scientific ones.

La propuesta del presente dossier de Astrolabio pretende contribuir a la reflexión crítica sobre las formas contemporáneas de producción, preservación y circulación del conocimiento, a partir del cruce entre archivos, medios, dispositivos editoriales y agencias no humanas. En un contexto marcado por la expansión de la circulación digital, la datificación de producciones científicas, artísticas y culturales, la proliferación de infraestructuras algorítmicas y la creciente fragilidad de los sistemas de preservación documental, el dossier propone volver sobre el archivo como problema teórico, político y material. Los trabajos reunidos abordan distintas prácticas de registro, conservación, montaje, reinscripción y transmisión de documentos, imágenes, cartas, revistas, archivos digitales, fondos teatrales, producciones editoriales y memorias comunitarias. En conjunto, permiten interrogar qué entendemos hoy por documento, qué diferencia a un archivo de un contenido o un dato, y qué poderes intervienen en la decisión de preservar, hacer circular, olvidar o destruir. Desde perspectivas situadas y heterogéneas, el dossier busca problematizar el archivo no como depósito estable del pasado, sino como una práctica viva, atravesada por disputas epistémicas, técnicas, institucionales y políticas. En este sentido, propone pensar el archivo como espacio de crítica, hallazgo y reinvención frente a las transformaciones contemporáneas de la memoria y del conocimiento.

Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science. Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large‐scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications ( N = 87,577,942) and of cited references ( N = 1,480,570,087). For the 1990–2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country‐level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm the same‐language preference phenomenon (particularly for languages other than English), the strong connection between multilingualism and bibliodiversity, and that social sciences and humanities are the least English‐dominated fields. Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national‐language and English‐language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication.

A review of Philosophy of Open Science, by Sabina Leonelli. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Cambridge, United Kingdom. 80 pp. ISBN 9781009416368. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416368

Este artículo analiza las potencialidades y limitaciones de la perspectiva translingüística como marco teórico aplicado al estudio de las comunicaciones científico-académicas. Se realiza una revisión teórica del denominado “giro trans” en la lingüística, especialmente la sociolingüística, la lingüística aplicada y la pedagogía de enseñanza de lenguas. A continuación, se consideran las características de los intercambios comunicativos propios del campo científico-académico, en sus distintos circuitos a nivel internacional, regional y local. Finalmente, se discuten tanto la riqueza como las carencias de este paradigma como caja de herramientas metodológica y teórica aplicada al análisis de este objeto de estudio particular, y su potencialidad en términos de diseño de políticas lingüísticas tendientes a una mayor inclusión y democratización de las condiciones de producción, circulación y apropiación del conocimiento dentro de este campo del espacio social.

Entrevista con Vincent Larivière, experto reconocido mundialmente en temas de acceso abierto, publicaciones científicas, multilingüismo y sociología de la ciencia. Doctor en Ciencias de la Información por la Universidad McGill, detenta la Cátedra UNESCO sobre la Ciencia Abierta y es co-titular de la Cátedra de investigación de Québec sobre la descubrabilidad de contenidos científicos en francés [Chaire de recherche du Québec sur la découvrabilité des contenus scientifiques en français]. También es profesor en la Escuela de Bibliotecología y Ciencias de la Información de la Universidad de Montréal, Director Científico del consorcio editorial Érudit, y vicedirector científico del Observatorio de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Universidad de Québec en Montréal. En esta entrevista, nos enfocamos en las publicaciones científicas, la evaluación y los indicadores de CyT, y las propuestas de la ciencia abierta.

Scholarly publishing involves multiple stakeholders having various types of interest. In Canada, the implication of universities, the presence of societies and the availability of governmental support for periodicals seem to have contributed to a rather diverse ecosystem of journals. This study presents in detail the current state of these journals, in addition to past trends and transformations during the 20th century and, in particular, the digital era. To this effect, we created a new dataset, including a total of 1265 journals, 943 of which appeared to be active today, specifically focusing on the supporting organizations behind the journals, the types of (open) access, disciplines, geographic origins, languages of publication and hosting platforms and tools. The main overarching traits across Canadian scholarly journals are an important presence of Diamond open access, which has been adopted by 61% of the journals, a predominance of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and a scarce presence of the major commercial publishers. The digital era allowed for the development of open infrastructures, which contributed to the creation of a new generation of journals that massively adopted Diamond open access, often supported by university libraries. However, journal cessation also increased, especially among the recently founded journals. These results provide valuable insights for the design of tailored practices and policies that cater to the needs of different types of periodicals and that consider the evolving practices across the Canadian scholarly journal landscape

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English‐language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open‐source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently still being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in‐depth manual validation of a sample of 6836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata are not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing, but more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.

Céspedes and Maggio turn a lens on publication practices in their contribution to this special issue's focus on cross‐cultural dialogue.

This study describes US-based physicians' online public communication practices, particularly on the social media platform Twitter/X, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on 28 semi-structured interviews to examine how they responded to the unique COVID-19 context with respect to each of the four features of post-normal science (PNS): facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. Our analysis reveals that the pandemic shifted what, why, and how physicians used the platform, and with whom they aimed to communicate. We discuss the implications of these changes in their online communication habits, discourses, and representations around social media as a reaction to the context of PNS brought about by the pandemic.