Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Digital infrastructures, such as editorial management systems (EMS), play a crucial role in academic publishing. However, despite their ubiquity, they have received surprisingly little analytical attention. Here, we investigate how EMSs are employed in practice and contribute to editorial evaluations. Conducting a case study of a biomedical publisher, we investigate the selection of peer reviewers by editors, using both qualitative and quantitative data. When looking at how interactions between editors and the digital infrastructures unfold, we observed three analytically different types of interaction: (1) editors and infrastructure jointly accomplish the acceleration of peer review, (2) editors mitigate the infrastructure when establishing a collective memory, and (3) editors disengage from the infrastructure when they evaluate potential reviewers. Through strategic disengagement from and mitigation of the infrastructures, editors create interpretative spaces for themselves. This way, most of the interpretative and evaluative work still remains in the domain of the human editorial staff. Our results furthermore highlight the importance of the specific spatial, social, organizational, and cultural conditions of the editorial office for editors’ ability to modulate their engagement with the infrastructures, create interpretative spaces, and shape infrastructural effects. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper shows that expert authority can be the result of a process of co-construction by scientists and users, using the case of the Netherlands’ storm warnings system. I analyze the changing “culture of prediction” of the Netherlands’ storm warnings system between 1860 and about 1920, focusing on the changing relation between scientific experts and users with experience-based expertise. When started, the storm warnings relied on users taking an active role. The new storm warning system, introduced by Buys Ballot in 1860 following the introduction of telegraph networks, explicitly tried to mobilize sailors’ weather wisdom. Following complaints from the maritime community and controversies about criteria for accuracy or reliability around 1900, storm forecasting authority became the exclusive domain of scientists. Interestingly, the authority of experts was not challenged during this controversy. Rather, the debates focused on mutual expectations of expertise and on whether the storm warning system was primarily a scientific or a practical system. This paper is based on historical documentation from the archives of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, which includes the perspectives of users. </jats:p>