The Social Shaping of the Scholarly Communication System in Mongolia

Abstract

The adoption of electronic methods dominates the modern discussion of the scholarly communication process. What is often overlooked in this discussion, however, is how the scholarly communication process is constructed, with researchers, patrons, and librarians negotiating over how to finance and package the distribution of research findings. The constructed nature of the scholarly communication process calls into question the dominant theme in the literature that all disciplines across all cultures will eventually converge on a common set of scholarly communication practices. It stands to reason that the scholarly communication process is likely to look quite different in a developed country, where networked technology is widely available and where scholars and their patrons see value in their intellectual property, than in a developing country, where networked technology is less prevalent and financial constraints play an outsized role. And while there have been a number of investigations of the use of electronic scholarly communication methods in specific developing countries that address differences in the availability of resources, there has been an absence of discussion of electronic scholarly communication methods in developing countries from the perspective of social shaping of technology where the interaction process across actors and with technology is highlighted. In this article we investigate the constructed nature of the electronic scholarly communication process in Mongolia and identify some of the social and economic forces that are shaping it.

Keywords:

• Mongolia
• electronic scholarly communication
• social shaping of technology

Acknowledgments

The manuscript received valuable comments at the 2010 Association for Asian Studies Conference and from multiple anonymous reviewers. The Elizabethtown College Faculty International Scholarship Seminar initially funded this project in 2009. The United States–Mongolia Field Research Fellowship Program, sponsored by the American Center for Mongolian Studies, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the US Department of Education, provided generous funding to complete this project in 2011.

Notes

1 Ghosh and Das 2007 provides an overview of the role played by information in a developing economy.

2 The vast majority of scholarship on the scholarly communication process in developing countries recommends the adoption of open access initiatives. For a bibliography of this literature, see Bailey 2013.

3 An overview of this transition is given in Bohlin 2004.

4 The issues faced in developing countries with respect to scholarly communication are discussed in Arunachalam 2003.

5 In technological determinism, it is technical change that fuels economic and social change. Themes of technological determinism are found most recently in Friedman 2005 and date back to Thorstein Veblen.

6 The seminal piece in the literature on the social shaping of technology is Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989.

7 The literature on open access scholarly communication initiatives is extensive. Three particularly relevant pieces are Harnad et al. 2004, Bo-Christer 2004, and Willinsky 2003.

8 Ghosh and Das 2007: 3 provides a brief overview of the slight differences in the definition of open access within the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and by a American Research Libraries Association task force on open access in 2004.

9 The link between open access initiatives and democratizing information is explored in Ylotis 2005; the ability of open access initiatives to enrich the global conversation is explored in Chan and Costa 2005; the link that open access provides to researchers in the developing world is examined in Haider 2007; and the way in which open access scholarship allows a society to grow and prosper is discussed in Krishnamurthy 2008.

10 The challenges of financing open access scholarly communication initiatives are substantial. An overview of these challenges is provided in Chang 2006 and Cockerill 2006.

11 Kirsop and Chan 2005 provides an overview of donated access and open access scholarly communication initiatives in developing countries.

12 Keith Silver (2002) also noted that extending access to developing countries was a good public relations move and allowed publishers to establish an early presence in an emerging market.

13 Examples of this scholarship include Igun 2005, Manaf 2006, Fang and Zhu 2006, Ghosh and Das 2007, Fernandez 2006, Gul, Shah, and Baghwan 2010, Bhat 2009, Boumarafi 2010, and Luo, Wang, and Zhou 2010.

14 An excellent early piece that documents the economic challenges faced in Mongolia is found in Asian Development Bank 1992.

15 The significant contraction in economic performance in the early 1990s in Mongolia is documented in Marshall, Nixson, and Walters 2007: 440–41.

16 The economy grew over 6 percent in 2010, with a broad-based recovery from a slight 1.3 percent contraction in 2009, and has averaged 9 percent per year dating back to 2004 (World Bank 2011: 29).

17 The natural resource curse, or the paradox of plenty, refers to the tendency of countries with an abundance of nonrenewable resources to eventually have lower economic growth rates and worse development outcomes than countries that lacked such resources. The curse was first postulated by Richard Auty (1993) and later summarized by Jeff Frankel (2010). The reasons for this relationship between natural resource extraction and economic growth are varied and include reduced competitiveness of the export sector as the exchange rate rises (due to foreign demand to buy the natural resource), the potential for inefficiencies as the government establishes an ownership claim over the resource, and the crowding out of the manufacturing sector as the country focuses on resource extraction. This is outlined for Mongolia specifically in World Bank 2011: 23–24.

18 A brief description of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences can be found at http://www.mas.ac.mn and at www.interacademies.net/ByRegion/SouthEastAsiaPacific/Mongolia/13499.aspx. These government agencies are also discussed in Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science 2007: 41–43.

19 These priorities were indicated in conversations with officials at the MAS and are reiterated on the MAS website.

20 The Soviet Union repressed Mongolian history and culture in favor of the instruction of socialist ideals.

21 According to Hirshon 2002, this access was valued at $20,000 and was paid for by the Mongolian Foundation for Open Society.

22 Licenses were held by the MAS, Mongolian State University of Education, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, National Library of Mongolia, and the National University of Mongolia.

23 From usage statistics collected by Gantulga Lkhagva, of the 470 full-text downloads made in 2007, 380 were made at the National University of Mongolia.

24 From usage statistics collected by Gantulga Lkhagva, of the 129 full-text downloads made in 2007, 82 were at the MAS.

25 This data was collected by Thomas Scheiding at the American Center for Mongolian Studies in May 2009.

26 Usage statistics were collected by Gantulga Lkhagva.

27 For a discussion of funding in Western Europe, see Braun 2008; for the United States, see Block and Keller 2011.

28 A good overview of the literature on the social shaping of technology is found in Kling, McKim, and King 2003.

29 A comprehensive survey of international perceptions of scholarly communication by researchers is found in Rowlands and Nichols 2006.

30 There is a broad literature on the determination of a national innovation system. It began with Freeman 1987 and was further refined in Lundvall 1992, Nelson 1993, and Freeman 1995.

31 In the Science and Technology Master Plan of Mongolia, the development of a national innovation system is identified as a priority in strengthening the research system and economy (Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science 2007: 32, 60).