Evolution of scientific communication will need to climb three steps:
1. Universities must provide green open access to their entire research production (Green OA through repositories), making sure it is complete;
2. Universities must cancel all their subscriptions to scientific publications;
3. Universities must contribute to setting up free publicly-run publication platforms and favor open peer reviewing.
This is the dawn of an entirely new science communication and interaction paradigm, which is mimicking on the publication scale the process followed on a smaller scale in scientific conferences. But this requires universal enforcement of this principle. Nowadays, those universities which are taking step 2 run the risk of sacrificing their researchers’ access to information. We should encourage them in this act of resistance, or even rebellion, and we should move forward all together now.
Step 4: all researchers must cite only those articles that are available on line freely. The transition period will be difficult, like all transition periods, because of the scientific need to quote good relevant articles that are actually hidden behind paywalls, but after a while, it will decrease the pressure of the prestige factor and hopefully get rid of it, if human nature permits.
Can we grasp a utopian concept and make it happen ?
31 mardi Jan 2017
