The Social Shaping of the Scholarly Communication System in Mongolia Thomas Scheiding, Borchuluun Yadamsuren, and Gantulga Lkhagva Received: 7 September 2010 / Accepted: 7 August 2012 q National Science Council, Taiwan 2013 Abstract The adoption of electronic methods dominates the modern discussion of the scholarly communication process. What is often overlooked in this discussion, how- ever, is how the scholarly communication process is constructed, with researchers, patrons, and librarians negotiating over how to finance and package the distribution of research findings. The constructed nature of the scholarly communication process calls into question the dominant theme in the literature that all disciplines across all cultures will eventually converge on a common set of scholarly communication prac- tices. It stands to reason that the scholarly communication process is likely to look quite different in a developed country, where networked technology is widely avail- able and where scholars and their patrons see value in their intellectual property, than in a developing country, where networked technology is less prevalent and financial constraints play an outsized role. And while there have been a number of investi- gations of the use of electronic scholarly communication methods in specific developing countries that address differences in the availability of resources, there has been an absence of discussion of electronic scholarly communication methods in developing countries from the perspective of social shaping of technology where the interaction process across actors and with technology is highlighted. In this article we Acknowledgments The manuscript received valuable comments at the 2010 Association for Asian Studies Conference and from multiple anonymous reviewers. The Elizabethtown College Faculty International Scholarship Seminar initially funded this project in 2009. The United States–Mongolia Field Research Fellowship Program, sponsored by the American Center for Mongolian Studies, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the US Department of Education, provided generous funding to complete this project in 2011. T. Scheiding (*) College of Business and Management, Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, WI 53217, USA e-mail: tdscheiding@stritch.edu B. Yadamsuren (*) University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA e-mail: YadamsurenB@missouri.edu G. Lkhagva (*) Mongolian Libraries Consortium, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 14200 e-mail: gantluga@mongolianlibraries.org.mn East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2013) 7:533–555 DOI 10.1215/18752160-2392560