Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific ...

esearchers who do not have access to
subject-based archives in their discipline or to
an institutional repository.
At the worldwide level, the recent CODATA’s
initiative “Global Information Commons for
Science” proposes a partnership and a platform
to coordinate action, “for the purpose of
raising awareness on the part of the actors and
increasing the effectiveness of the activities
directed to facilitating various methods of
open access and re-use of publicly-funded
scientific data and information, and to promoting
cooperative sharing of research tools and
materials among researchers” 127 . The undertaking
already has significant institutional support from
ICSTI, ICSU, INASP, TWAS, UNESCO, and the
OECD, and is expected to be launched as an outcome
of the second and final phase of WSIS.
New journal business models and rankings
In terms of the future of the industry, note that
possibilities opened by electronic access mean
that in journal publishing a variety of flexible
business models can be tested and promoted.
If research funding agencies call for publication
in open access journals, they should provide
funding for publication costs. This would allow
for a level-playing field for the different journal
business models to be tested and assessed
regarding their economic viability as well as
other dimensions. The specific added value of
journals typically relies now on peer review
management, bundling of articles relevant to a
particular community, “branding” level of quality,
as well as rich search and linking functionalities.
Thanks to the increased availability of statistics,
further competition between journals could
now be introduced on the authors’ side regarding
what they value (or what their funding bodies
value) beyond citation potential, like speed of
publication, self-archiving allowed upon
publication or within short delay, author-friendly
copyright contracts, abstract and indexing
services, reference linking, long-term preservation
provisions etc. Given the increased importance
of journal rankings on researcher careers, it
would be desirable to think about more
comprehensive rankings that would raise
author awareness of these dimensions by
taking them explicitly into account.
Scientific quality, approximated for example by
citation counts or impact factor, should
obviously remain the predominant dimension
of journal quality for scientific evaluation, but
it would be useful to design rankings of ‘social
responsibility’ of scientific journals in terms of
their contribution to good practices of efficient
dissemination and preservation. There is a central
role for funding bodies to define policies
towards their funded researchers which will
improve access and dissemination of publications,
especially in terms of self-archiving
requirement, copyright contract model, “social
responsibility” rankings of journals. There could
be an impetus from public authorities at the
European level for such an initiative, which
would add diversity to the existing information
supplied by Thomson ISI, and would naturally
induce publishers to stress good practices in
these dimensions.
Unbundling certification and dissemination
Let us end with a more speculative note on the
effect of electronic access concerning the
long-term future of the traditional model where
publishers fulfill both the roles of certification
and of diffusion. There are at least two ways by
which certification and diffusion may be
unbundled: repositories and browsing services.
Repositories can be used potentially to unbundle
diffusion from certification. Repositories can be
used to deposit published articles, as it is the
case for instance with PubMed Central where
papers having benefited from NIH funding will be
deposited one year after publication. In this case,
certification is provided by the publisher before
the article is deposited. But repositories are also
used to archive preprints or manuscripts; and
here there is no explicit certification, except perhaps
(an imperfect) one obtained by measuring
the number of downloads of a given paper. While
it is possible to envision a certification made on
the basis of the archived paper (some recent
experiences are NJE in economics and Faculty of
1000 in Biomed), it is not clear yet how such
unbundling would operate if based on a
peer-review system.
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