Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Modest Proposal For Scholarly Publishing: 21st Century Ideas For A 19th Century System, Shawn Martin

Shawn Martin

In 1729 Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal which proposed (albeit sarcastically) that Irish peasants could solve their economic problems by selling their children to the rich. The point Swift was making, with an admittedly morbid sense of humor, was that Ireland was facing serious problems and that transformational change was needed. Similarly, the scholarly publishing and communication system is also in need of such changes in order to continue. To facilitate this change, it is important to re-frame how we think about scholarly publishing. Disseminating scholarship is no longer a matter of simply publishing work in a print monograph …