Authors:
Ligia E. Setenareski
;
Walter Shima
;
Marcos Sunye
and
Leticia Peres
Affiliation:
Federal University of Paraná, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Information Technology, Marketplace Competitiveness, Market Structure, Open Digital Repositories.
Abstract:
This paper shows how the market structure of scientific publications works and how the free-software
movement and the open source code have expanded and generated new developments in a period of
approximately twenty years, in opposition to an oligopolistic structure. The free-software movement did not
happen by chance, and neither did its subsequent developments. Researchers, tired of contributing towards
the production of scientific articles for private publishers, and also working as reviewers or taking part in
editorial boards, launched many alternatives within the editorial market in clear opposition to the publishing
industry, which has been making handsome profits on packaged periodicals sold to academic libraries.
Some of these alternatives are: the Copyleft and the Creative Commons in opposition to the Copyright; the
Open Access and the Open Digital Repositories of educational and research institutions, freely available on
the internet, opposing to the closed reposit
ories of commercial publishers that offer their database at high
prices; and the creation of h-index, g-index, Google Scholar Citations (GSC) and other impact
measurements that come up against the impact factor controlled by private publishers. In the editorial
process, while educational and research institutions, through their researchers, provide all workforce
necessary for the production, arbitration and editorial board, publishers are in charge of organizing services,
providing reliable browsing on their closed database, and keeping high levels of impact for their
publications. Nowadays, search providers like Google also offer reliable search engines to browse open
digital repositories. Therefore, Google and the Open Digital Repositories, in a symbiotic relationship, can be
in charge of the whole process of scientific publication, as an alternative to oppose the oligopoly of
scientific publishers.
(More)