CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6)

The impact of Internet on the scientific publising field: among new business models and collaborative reserach initiatives

Not scheduled

1m

University of Geneva

Speaker

Dr Diego Ponte (Università di Trento)

Description

In the last decade, the Internet has extensively shaped several dimensions of the social and business sectors. From an historical point of view, this revolution might be divided in two main phases. In the first phase, the rapid evolution of various innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) permitted to cut the costs of sending information and raising efficiency. The second phase has seen a burgeoning number of initiatives using the most innovative features offered by the so called Web 2.0. This latter offers a collaborative and open way of generating, organizing, and managing knowledge. As a matter of fact, there is a growing empirical evidence which seems to support the idea that the “open and collaborative” trend, has started to represent a major shift of the business setting. This revolution has affected the scientific knowledge production and dissemination sector as well. While ICT permitted the whole sector to shift from a paper-based to a digital-based medium, now several Web 2.0 initiatives are exploring innovative ways of scientific knowledge production and dissemination. These initiatives might be divided in four main areas. First, several internationally recognized journals have adopted an open and collaborative process of evaluating scientific papers. To cite but a few, these most famous journals are arXiv (e-print archive), Nature (pre-print archive), Plos One. Second, other initiatives permit social bookmarking and tagging of Web resources. The most used social bookmarking tools are Connotea, CiteULike, Del.icio.us, BibSonomy and 2collab. Third, several services allow researchers to create and maintain blogs, wikis and to build social networks. Among others the most famous are ResearchBlogging, ScienceBlog, and Nature Network. Four, several initiatives such as the European project LiquidPub started to explore the potentials benefits and weaknesses of collaborative writing within the scientific publishing sector. While this burgeoning number of initiatives indicates that the potentials benefits of using the Web 2.0 gathered attention from the actors of the whole sector, the diversity, number, inconsistencies among these initiatives show that the field is still a “work in progress” and no common understanding on what a Science 2.0 should be has been achieved. Furthermore, there are many threats affecting the use of these tools. First, hitherto there is no common and well accepted evaluation procedure that permits research institutes and universities to judge the “goodness” of those researchers that work on and contribute to these tools and initiatives. Second, the content which is created and maintained thanks to these initiatives might raise copyright issues as effective authorship policies of such contributions are still being explored. Starting from these considerations, the research I will show is conerned with an in-dept analysis of the services as offered by the aforementioned initiatives. To understand the potential benefits and weaknesses of such initiatives we analyze them by comparing their services with those offered by most of the traditional scientific publishers. Considering that currently the whole sector (from the point of view of the main actors i.e. researchers, universities and libraries) is relying on the services provided by traditional publishers, this parallel allow to highlight where and how innovative services might compete with the traditional ones, whether innovative services are not covering all the traditional services and whether they are offering more than the traditional ones.