On the Development of Scholarly Communication. A Philosophical Approach to the Communication History

Abstract

The study considers a significant philosophical problem: what is the impact of means and forms of communication on social practices? Plato in the Phaedrus wrote that the art of writing (as a mean and form of communication) transforms our ability to remember. In this article, I demonstrate the importance of the problem and I investigate the transformations of scholarly communication in contemporary science. The idea of Open Science is known as a model for the scientific practices. In this study, I extend the existing approach and I define the idea as a set of rules (norms, instructions) for academic practices. I assume that scholarly communication is a foundation of Open Science. Furthermore, I present three domains of Open Science: the Open Access, the Open Data, and the Citizen Science. The main problem, however, is how to philosophically interpret the transformations of scholarly communication’s practices. The value of this approach lies in a perspective of the philosophy of communication that can be very effective in characterizing the sociocultural transformation.