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. Drawing on the political economy of publishing and critical theory of technology, the dissertation exhaustively documents the “serials crisis” wrought by predatory commercial publishers who imposed monopoly pricing, publication delays averaging 28–32 months, and a gatekept peer-review system that forced cutting-edge discourse into semi-private “invisible colleges.” It further demonstrates how neoliberal privatization threatened to enclose publicly funded scholarship behind paywalls and site licenses, betraying the Baconian ideal of open, rapid, democratic knowledge dissemination. For the SpiritWiki, this work is theoretically significant because it establishes the historical necessity of replacing the slow, expensive, exclusionary journal model with a non-commercial, open, and technologically sophisticated alternative—precisely the vision that SpiritWiki realizes through its open-access, public-domain, stewarded knowledge ecosystem.