Self-publishing: old method – new meaning at the age of new e-science technologies

Abstract

The issues raised in the article correspond to the problems of building up new information systems in science that are labelled in the relevant literature as e-library, library 2.0, e-science, Web 2.0, etc. The article specifically deals with the changes to be necessitated in the habits of the scientific community towards publishing in view of the mentioned directions of the development of scientific communication. The present writer predicts that the construction of the new information systems will soon make self-publishing of scientific content much more popular and more widespread. This, in turn, will effect in a vigorous development of open access academic repositories. The phenomenon of self-publishing will be also conducive to a change (a kind of a shift) in the method of evaluation of published research and scientific material. The evaluation and research assessment will also include automatic computation of relevant citations. A degree of received citations could become one of the parameters to be used in said repositories, supplementing the positive evaluation provided by peer review. Moreover, the phenomenon of self-publishing should popularize scientific blogs and, within this particular context, foster the appearance of a habit of immediate commenting on scientific reports of scholars on their own research work by other specialists representing the same disciplines. Such an exchange of information will be feasible due to the new possibilities offered by self-publishing and should fully replace the necessity of organizing expensive scientific conferences that are mainly attended by just a fraction of the community members. The author of the article is fully aware that, beside the favourable effects of the phenomenon outlined in the article, there are also some undesirable side effects. These can be manifested by a possible ”exclusion” of older generations of scholars from the vitality of the process as the latter group is not inclined to accept and successively master new technologies.