The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.

Alan G. Gross work is firmly grounded in the humanities, having been trained as a Shakespeare scholar at Princeton under Gerald Eades Bentley. In a long career, he has been an English professor at Wayne State, a Dean at Purdue-Calumet, and professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. In the last quarter-century, he has written and co-written a steady stream of major-press books on academic communication.

Joseph E. Harmon works as a science writer, editor, and manager at Argonne National Laboratory. He is the coauthor with Alan Gross of Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present, The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, The Craft of Scientific Communication, and Science from Sight to Insight: How Scientists Illustrate Meaning.