This is not an article: Model organism newsletters and the question of ‘open science’

Scientific newsletters, especially in biology, flourished in the twentieth century. They are virtually unstudied, but can tell us a great deal about the simultaneous development of scientific communities or collectives and the concepts, techniques, collections, materials and maps they produce. This article introduces scientific newsletters as a ‘model organism’ on which to study the moral economy of science. As an exemplary case, the article explores issues of property and propriety in the Drosophila Information Service and explains how newsletters constitute a closed community at the same time that they demand the unrestricted sharing of organisms, techniques, results and other information within the community. The last third of the article compares aspects of newsletters with the contemporary claims about ‘open science’ in the case of synthetic biology, and speculates about the relationship of the current political economy of intellectual property to the moral economies present in newsletters.