Sharing Knowledge: Scientific Communication - SSOAR

188 Hans E. Roosendaal, Peter A. Th. M. Geurts
like effectively 10-15 years per student-lifetime. The transformation of the educational
system towards a system based on customisation rather than massification
is designed to lead to a higher mobility of students within the international
research and educational system world-wide. It is amongst others for this reason
that Europe-wide a new bachelor-master-PhD system is being introduced. This
development will have severe consequences for the financing and rewarding
systems of the academic institutions and will open up novel options for publicprivate
collaboration between these institutions and relevant industry worldwide.
Next to collaboration within academia, collaboration between academia
and industry will become a normal mode. No doubt, this will have a severe impact
on the economic conditions under which the academic institution will have
to operate in future and the benefits for the institution of such a new economic
regime will crucially depend on the institution’s investments in a publishing and
archiving environment. This is the very reason for a fundamental change in the
value chain as it represents a substantial change in the position of the academic
institution in supporting and representing the main actors in the value chain: the
authors and the readers, now being students, teachers as well as researchers.
These actors will make use of a variety of overlapping information sources depending
on their specific needs at a given time. It will support the trend that students
will start as junior researchers gradually becoming more senior as they
progress in their student career. Such a development to a conceptual integration
of research and education is commensurate with the bachelor-master-PhD system
now being introduced throughout Europe. A prerequisite for such a development
is adequate access and navigation for the student over the various
information sources. Adequate access to and navigation in scientific information,
i.e. both for research and education, turns out to be key for further
conceptual integration of research and education, a universal goal of all times. It
is the application of ICT that makes this goal attainable.
Achieving this goal requires a degree of technical integration of scientific information
ranging from interoperability between the various sources at one institution
to a federated system between institutions and even to a fully technically
integrated system. For the discussion of this paper it suffices to note, as we
have already noted above in discussing the value chain, that both research information
and educational information are subject to very similar requirements, in
particular with respect to the registration, archiving and certification function,
albeit that the actors may be different. The desired mobility of the actors, in particular
of the most mobile actor the student, requires an actor centred information
system for the academic institution.