In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing

This paper examines the history of scientific publishing from the creation of the first public registry of ideas by Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society of London, in the mid-17th century, through the transformation of scholarly journal publishing into big business in the mid-19th century, up to the electronic publishing revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century. Guédon, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal, proposes a new alliance between research scientists and librarians to combat the "serial publishing crisis" in which scientific journals have been priced out of the range of many libraries. He is particularly interested in the potential of networking technologies to improve scholarly communication. Recognizing the importance of librarians in the struggle to keep the knowledge commons open and accessible, he urges them to throw all of their weight behind the Open Archive Initiative to help the higher education community regain control of scientific publishing. The paper is based on a presentation he made to members of the Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries in May 2001.