The New Role of Professional Organisations in the Management of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

The Internet is changing not only the way the architects and engineers work, but also how the scientists collaborate. In the paper based world, professional organisations, such as the CIB and scientific publishers provided for getting the right people together and for making sure their work gets distributed to their peers. Electronic networks, such as the Internet, are providing the scientists the means to take those activities into their own hands. In the paper we present the goals of an EU project called SciX. The goal of SciX is to analyse the business processes of the scientific publishing, invent new publication models and through a series of pilots demonstrate how this should work. In the envisioned scenarios, professional organisations such as the CIB play an important role. Their members are the potential users of SciX's platforms, authors and readers of the papers. Organisations could also become the publishers and archivers of the knowledge created within their respective community. The goal of the paper is to engage the members of the CIB-W78 community in the developments in SciX, to help fineshaping the goals, defining the requirements and monitoring the usability of the pilots.