Historical Groundwork

The Historical Groundwork category supplies the political-economic critique that makes the SpiritWiki necessary rather than merely preferable. This section archives Sosteric’s 1999 dissertation Electronic Journals and the Transformation of Scholarly Publication, early warnings such as Electronic Journals—The Grand Information Future? (1996), and Freedom from the Press (1999), alongside Stevan Harnad’s Post-Gutenberg Galaxy and documents relating to the International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication (ICAAP). Together these works exhaustively document the “serials crisis”: predatory pricing, 28–32 month publication delays, site-license enclosures, and the ideological capture of digital scholarly communication by commercial publishers who forced electronic production back into paper-era cost models. They also record the practical barriers—unrewarded editorial labor, technical skill gaps, guild-like closure, and lack of collective political consciousness—that prevented scholars from seizing their own infrastructure.

Table of contents

  • Electronic Journals and the Transformation of Scholarly Communication - Mike Sosteri'c 1999 dissertation, _Electronic Journals and the Transformation of Scholarly Publication_, provides the foundational political-economic critique that underpins the SpiritWiki project.
  • At the Speed of Thought - Captures the critical historical moment when the promise of electronic scholarly publishing was being actively betrayed by commercial publishers who, rather than reducing costs, were forcing libraries to purchase both print and electronic versions at inflated rates that the International Coalition of Library Consortia warned could increase total costs by 40% or more—transforming the digital revolution into a “nightmare of unregulated monopoly control.”
  • Electronic Journals - The Grand Information Future - Published in 1996 in the Electronic Journal of Sociology, _Electronic Journals - The Grand Information Future?_ stands as one of the earliest political-economic warnings about the impending commercial betrayal of digital scholarly communication.
  • Post-Gutenburg Galaxy - The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge - In Post-Gutenberg Galaxy - The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge, Stevan Harnad argues that human cognition and communication have undergone three qualitative revolutions—speech, writing, and print—each fundamentally altering how knowledge is produced and shared, and that a fourth revolution is now emerging through "electronic skywriting" (networked email and discussion groups).
  • TLDR Electronic Journals and the Transformation of Scholarly Publication - AI generated TLDR (vetted by me) of the 1999 dissertation listed above
  • Freedom from the Press - Published in The Technology Source in 1999, _Freedom from the Press - Alternative Academic Publication Strategies and the True Potentials of Information Technology_ diagnoses why the promised electronic-journals revolution had stalled. Rather than exploiting information technology to slash costs and democratize access, commercial and even non-profit publishers were forcing digital production into the old paper-based paradigm—preserving bloated subscription bureaucracies, access-control systems, and inflated “first-copy” cost models that kept scholarly communication slow, expensive, and institutionally gatekept.
  • The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic publication - The 2004 article chronicles ICAAP as a not-for-profit initiative devoted to the inexpensive web-based publication of scholarly journals, founded by Michael Sosteric at Athabasca University as a direct response to the “serials crisis” wrought by predatory commercial publishers. Positioned as a pragmatic “middle way” between radical preprint archives and the conservative commercial mainstream, ICAAP sought to return low-circulation, peer-reviewed journal production to scholar-led hands through open-source software, SGML-based markup (IXML), automated editorial workflows, and centralized infrastructure services offered free to member journals.
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