THE FUTURE: ELECTRONIC DISSEMINATION OF SCIENCE

For multiple reasons, the traditional scientific journals, printed on paper, are facing a gradual, although slow, disappearance. Among the factors leading to this situation are the growing costs of paper and postage, the slowness of printing and distribution processes and the difficulties in the access and archiving of paper documents. All of this contrasts markedly with the speed, economy and efficiency of electronic media, which also make possible the dream of free access to knowledge for everybody, everywhere.

The progressive incorporation of electronic media in the dissemination of scientific research has penetrated the academic strata in Latin America and the Caribbean, even though at a much slower pace than it has in the first world countries, where important experiences have been carried out in this domain.

Researchers, both in their roles as authors who look for the best possible publication site for their work as well as in their role as readers, have been less reactive to the existing situation than librarians. Different electronic publication and archiving venues have been established, such as the Los Alamos Pre-print Archives, now at Cornell, SPIRES at Stanford, of PubMed Central at NIH. Other initiatives such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) search to promote and foster publication by electronic means with free access.

Due to the crisis that the ever-increasing and inelastic prices of science periodicals have been producing for over a decade in higher education and research institutions’ libraries, the latter have formed editorial consortia, such as SPARC and HighWire Press, for the publication, acquisition and distribution of journals that allow an adequate flow of the required documents without interference by commercial publishers.

Publishers, in turn, have assumed the challenge of working with electronic media and offer highly useful services with important added value, in the form of journal packages and search engines. Notwithstanding, publishing houses continue to be business enterprises oriented to obtain the largest possible profits with that which should be the property of the generators or of the institutions that sponsor and finance research, and not of the publishing houses.

In developing countries of our region very few scientific journals of high quality are produced and, given the insignificant profit, if any at all, that they yield upon commercialization, practically no international publisher will care for them. A couple of decades ago a well known large publisher assumed the production and distribution costs of Interciencia, at a time when it was still all paper, so as to use it as a lever to penetrate the Latin American market, but the adventure only lasted for a couple of years. It was not a good business.

Inasmuch as scientific journals published in the region are of an institutional nature, as is the case with almost all of them, belonging to institutions or professional societies that cover the expenses of their editorial offices, the step into an exclusively electronic publication carries with it an important reduction of printing and distribution costs, additional to those of the editorial production, which are maintained.

For Interciencia, however, the situation is extremely complex. As the journal does not have the financial backing of an institution, its survival is dependent on revenues from income and on grants. Revenues derive mostly from subscriptions that would disappear as it becomes an Internet free access journal, and from page charges, for which an efficient mechanism has not yet been established. Grants, which are accessed through the Program of Scientific Publications of the Venezuelan FONACIT and cover about one half of the total expenses of the journal, do not contemplate other expenses than the direct production and distribution costs of the printed version and the insertion of the material in the Scientific Electronic Library on Line (SciELO).

The search for stable financial support for the editorial production, both of the traditional printed version or the electronic one, continues to be a primary necessity.

Miguel Laufer

Editor Interciencia