Sharing Knowledge: Scientific Communication - SSOAR

186 Hans E. Roosendaal, Peter A. Th. M. Geurts
author > publisher > reviewer > publisher > agent >
Figure 2: traditional value chain
univ >
3.2 Some changes in the value chain due to ICT?
reader
In general, some major changes in the value chain due to the introduction of ICT
have been proposed, 11
It has been proposed to reduce the value chain to the author, reviewer and reader
only, i.e. essentially without any intermediaries from outside the research
process, be it the publisher, the agent, the academic institution or the library of
this institution. The author will be able to self-distribute the work via the Web
and any reviewer can pick it up to add his comments. Or even the reviewer can
be missed entirely as the reader may well be qualified to judge the work by himself.
However, there are a number of issues at stake: how is the marketing of the
work done, how will the reader find the publication, and how can publications
be filtered? And there is the problem of certification: who will select the
reviewer? Evidently the author should not and the reader cannot do this.
Another possibility will be to take the academic institution out of the chain. In
a digital environment it may well be feasible that the publisher is responsible for
the entire communication between author and reader. The only problem is that
the publisher will be responsible for the archive. It is probably not in the
publishers’interest to assume this responsibility and it is very likely that the academic
community will not entrust this responsibility to the publisher. Alternatively,
we can replace the publishers entirely by the academic institution at both
ends of the chain, at the author end and the reader end. But, who will select the
referee? This cannot be the task of the institution of the author. This will lead
academic institutions to create a wider forum in order to be able to better accomplish
this function by entering into alliances with other academic institutions. In
the end, this will most likely lead to a professionalisation of the publishing
function within this alliance: in other words, the “publisher” will be reinvented.
This is indeed a direction that some academic institutions and alliances have taken
by (re)establishing university presses. The result will be that more, new
journals and other information products will be added to the already existing
product range of publishers furthering the further proliferation of research
journals and other information products.
11 See e.g.: Don Tapscott, “The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked
Intelligence”, The MacGraw-Hill- Companies Inc., New York, 1996