The SciX Platform - Reaffirming the Role of Professional Societies in Scientific Information Exchange

Abstract

In the past, paper based publications were both the medium for the information exchange among the scientists as well as the measure of their scientific quality. The process was first run by professional societies and later taken over by commercial businesses. Today the Internet is used for the dissemination of scientific work, while evaluation of scientists and institutions remains based on the paper publications. Internet style dissemination is rather chaotic and includes personal emails, personal home pages and, to a limited extent, pre-print archives. In this paper we present the EU project SciX. The goals of SciX are to analyse the business processes of scientific publishing, to invent new publication models and, through a series of pilots, demonstrate how they could work. In the envisioned scenarios, professional associations such as EuropIA play an important role. Given tools like those demonstrated in SciX, associations could also become the archivists of the knowledge created within their respective community. A digital library of an association may include materials of several layers of quality, including per-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and pre-prints. Open access to papers, reports and theses in such archives enables the exchange of ideas, collaboration and provides education materials. The objective of this contribution focuses on involving the EuropIA-community in the open archiving process.