Digital repositories and scientific communication challenge

Abstract

Digital technology has a great influence on scientific communication and scientific research in general. As a result, science has become more highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive seeking for different kinds of support for research as well for other activities that follow research such as rapid publication of research results and dissemination and preservation of research data. Having these issues in mind, the traditional system of scientific communication has also begun search for a new publishing and communication platform. At the beginning of the 1990s digital repositories appeared as a possible solution offering several key advantages over the existing publishing and preservation solutions. At the moment digital repositories of scientific information are closest to the position of new mainstream publishing and communication platform in science as they have become more mature and developed networked information systems; as their number in the world is on the rise and as they have become more and more accepted by the scientific community. While first digital repositories were isolated systems, today they distributed federated and highly integrated applications and services. In combination with the open access initiative, digital repositories of scientific information started to offer many benefits for different groups of users. Furthermore, digital repositories could help smaller countries to become more visible in the global scientific community by offering online open access digital peer reviewed scientific content. Digital repositories should solve problems inherited from the existing paper based system of scientific communication: access to scientific information for different categories of users, storage space, slow publishing, quality and quantity of scientific knowledge, organization of scientific knowledge in transparent way, interoperability of information systems and many other issues scientific publishers, universities and their libraries haven’t solved so far. This paper offers an overview of the important characteristics that make digital repositories so important in modern science.