Sharing Knowledge: Scientific Communication - SSOAR

Reflections on the Value Chain of Scientific Information 189
The above leads to an academic institution-supported mode of “self publishing
and archiving” (see also Harnad 12 ) for research and education. To establish
such an environment requires the application of the same technologies as for
research information only. A quick estimate shows that the total volume of production
of educational information per institution would surpass by about an order
of magnitude its required production of research information only. This means
that the institution is in the position to piggy-back the production, archiving,
distribution and dissemination and of research information on the production,
archiving, distribution and dissemination of their educational information. Albeit,
that for archiving it may be noted that archiving for education is in general
shorter term archiving than archiving for research.
In summary, academic institutions will have to and will develop their own internal
value chain for information for research and teaching in order to prepare
themselves for a future of open exchange of this information in a new regime of
business models, or in a new value chain. It may be noted that the word business
model is being used throughout this article as a model for the sharing, exchanging
and trading of information between stakeholders of possibly different nature,
non-commercial or commercial and all possible permutations.
4.2 Strategic relations in the value chain
Following the above we start from the premise that the creation by academic institutions
of a publishing and archiving environment integrating the information
for research and teaching is a key strategic issue in scientific communication.
This means that academic institutions will each build institutional repositories
for research and teaching. These institutional repositories will allow a global
network of repositories. Next to these institutional repositories carrying the
works of the employees of the academic institution such a network also has to
cater for certification of the material. This requires the international organisation
of entities independent of the academic institutions, as we have seen when
discussing the value chain in chapter 3.2.
Furthermore, institutional repositories will allow academic institutions to
share and trade scientific information between them using a variety of appropriate
business models of choice within academia and between academia and
private industry. A clear vision on the value chain of scientific information is a
prerequisite for developing adequate business models.
This no doubt calls for a publishing role in such a network. This publishing
role can be organised between and by the academic institutions, or by other organisations
of a public or private character or by publishers, be these ‘for profit’
or ‘not for profit’ publishers. This publishing function is a facilitating and ag-
12 Stevan Harnad, “The self-archiving initiative”,
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html