Abstract
Abstract The author argues that the new digital possibilities in scientific communication do not imply, by any means, that many old requirements are becoming dispensable. The essential elements of the system, such as quality assurance, authenticity, orientation and navigation will still demand considerable expense. The overall system costs will rather be higher in a hybrid system. In the second part of his lecture, the author discusses the two fundamentally different open access models, the Golden Road, which is supposed to be able to operate, eventually, without any publishers, and the Green Road, whose functioning is based on primary publication through publishing houses. Finally, the basic issue of the indispensable qualitative stratigraphy of scientific documents is addressed. For this, the published journals, which also provide topical focus and, thus, orientation as well as active marketing in terms of optimal diffusion, still are a very capable tool. It is questionable to what extent these tasks could be fulfilled by university-based repositories. The publishing houses, on the other hand, have a proven track record of providing a wide range of useful value-adding services in digital publishing.
Highlights
The author argues that the new digital possibilities in scientific communication do not imply, by any means, that many old requirements are becoming dispensable
The immense new possibilities of knowledge storage, knowledge search and knowledge access brought by the digital revolution and, especially, the use of the Internet are accompanied by problems of their own, some of which are familiar and still need to be addressed in the digital environment, while others are new
The digital revolution opened up possibilities that would have or had been dismissed as fantasies just 30 years before
Summary
I am looking at the still indispensable requirements or functions that have to be fulfilled by a scientific communication system, and the inevitable costs involved. The question is if the abovementioned attempt of a fiscal breakout can be regarded as promising at all, considering the necessary maintenance of the scientific communication system. I am setting aside, for the moment, the question of who can or should provide these services. We will still need the peer review, i.e. scientific assessment, as well as proofreading and, sometimes, considerable formatting efforts. Even if the intellectual effort of the peer review is provided by scientists, the IT-based organization of it is an expensive service that, so far, has been rendered by the publishers
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