Scientific web publishing offers an attractive bundle of phenomena for feminist technoscientific investigation. This article focuses on research articles in scientific journals and aims at identifying a range of exclusionary practices in the current publishing system, which need to be critically addressed. For this purpose, the functionalities of digital objects are studied using the analogy of a piezoelectric crystal as a transducer in obstetric ultrasonography (Karen Barad 2001). This is embedded in the idea that scholarly communication, and publishing in particular, is characterized by an economy based on gift-giving-for-recognition.