Systemskifte på väg inom vetenskaplig publicering : nu vill forskarna återta kontrollen
Tidskrift For Dokumentation, 2002
Ordinary people, including university researchers, have very vague ideas of what scientific journ... more Ordinary people, including university researchers, have very vague ideas of what scientific journals cost to libraries. The price increases of scientific journals have been far above the standard inflation rate for several decades. The advent of e-journals and licensing has only moderated this trend. The system of scientific publishing has basically been run by the academia up to the Second World War. The unprecedented expansion of science and universities from the 50's opened the way for commercial publishers to get a central position within the system. Impact factors in Science Citation Index were used to single out core journals, which libraries felt they had to own whatever their price. A very dysfunctional market for scientific journals came into being. Universities first pay the wages of scientists that contribute to, evaluate or edit scientific journals and then pay spiralling subscription prices to have access to the resulting papers. Researchers as consumer do not see the costs and thus have weak motives for changing their choices as authors. Journal prices were only seen as a library problem. Aside from the negative economic effects, the present system limits access to research results to a growing potential audience that can not afford the cost of access. The development of the Internet provided researchers with new opportunities for communicating results both quicker and cheaper. E-print archives were created by physicists and other scientific communities. The Open Archives Initiative developed standards that made it possible to simultaneously search a large number of subject based or institutional e-print repositories. The number of institutions creating OAI-compliant archives is growing rapidly and includes many prestige universities in the USA and Europe. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition supports the creation of new scientist led journals that have reasonable prices. More than 26 000 researchers signed an open letter in 2001 where they demanded that journal publishers should deposit all articles, perhaps with some delay, in freely accessible archives like the PUBMed Central, an initiative of the National Institutes of Health. A number of different initiatives are converging to create a system for scientific publishing based on open access. Researchers, universities and libraries can all contribute to a change that would make it possible to realize the full potential of the Web to create a rich, open and creatively inter-linked new model for scientific publishing.
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Papers by Jan Hagerlid