Editorial

Abstract

**Editorial** Science Studies 1/2007 is the first issue by its new chief editors Dr. Tarja Knuuttila and Docent Sampsa Hyysalo. The decision to appoint two editors-in-chief was motivated by the steadily increasing amount of submissions, as well as by the need to retain a good grasp of the range of focal areas that comprise science and technology studies. Tarja Knuuttila is a philosopher of science currently studying scientific modelling and representation especially in the context of computational science. Sampsa Hyysalo’s primary field is science and technology studies. He has studied change in professional and everyday practices by focussing on the development and appropriation of health ICTs. The change in its editors does not mark a great transition in the focus of the journal. Science Studies continues to be both an international and interdisciplinary journal welcoming contributions to the study of science and technology from different points of view and different disciplinary backgrounds whether philosophical, historical, sociological, psychological, educational or politicoeconomic. At the moment the journal receives contributions from all over the world, the most contributions coming from the US and from Northern European countries. The acceptance rate is 20,5 for the moment, but it will fall, since we are receiving an increasing amount of contributions. This shows that the interest towards Science Studies is steadily growing. As to our website, Science Studies is also happy to announce that it has digitized and published all of its articles from 1988 to 1997. The ten volumes which have been published comprise over 100 articles on Science and Technology Studies and represent one of the largest fully accessible online collections available today. We are committed to distributing the content of Science Studies to as broad an audience as possible at no cost. Moreover, we have decreased our moving wall from one year to six months, allowing for increased visibility and access to our most recent content. The present volume contains four full articles concentrating mainly on science and science policy. In “From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells” Mike Michael et al. concentrate on a traditional STS-theme, that of experimenter’s regress. They contrast Collins’s core set model to an analysis in terms of assemblages in an attempt to show that scientific controversies need not end in the exclusion of the discredited faction of scientists from the core set. Rather, due to several reasons such as the ‘chronic uncertainty’ of stem cell research, the epistemically defeated faction can be rehabilitated because of the ‘social understandability’ of their strategies. ”Effects of ‘Mode 2’-Related Policy on the Research Process: The Case of Publicly Funded German Nanotechnology” by Andreas Wald and “Disentangling Transdisciplinarity: An Analysis of Knowledge Integration in Problem-Oriented Research” by Wolfgang Zierhofer and Paul Burger provide somewhat critical perspectives on the supposed advantages of Mode 2 policies and the very idea that transdisciplinary research, which is also referred to as Mode 2 science, represents a genuinely new model of knowledge production. Wald argues that nanotechnology research does not fit into the picture portrayed by Mode 2 literature, yet Mode 2-related policies are applied to it in the German context. As a result of this, policies are often considered harmful by the scientists. Zierhofer and Burger in turn seek to analyze the diversity of the supposed transdisciplinary mode of knowledge production in terms of various types of research objectives and related research instruments. Finally, Matt Ratto’s paper “A Practice-Based Model of Access for Science: Linux Kernel Development and Shared Digital Resources” presents a close-quarter analysis of Linux kernel development in order to build a model of access that would be apt for examining the increasingly distributed and digitally-mediated scientific work. This last paper is also a teaser for the next issue of Science Studies, which is a special issue on Free/Libre Open source software (FLOSS). Guest edited by Dr. Yuwei Lin and Prof. Lars Risan, Science Studies 2/2007 provides a set of highly interesting and in-depth studies on organization, work and development in FLOSS projects.