La comunicazione scientifica: il processo di pubblicazione e il mercato

This presentation is an overview on the current situation of the scientific publishing industry at the national, international and world-wide level. Scholarly communication is the process of dissemination of the outcomes coming from research in universities, private organizations or institutions or research centres. These results are presented in the form of intellectual outputs and often the intellectual outputs create articles which are published in journals addressed to the scientific community. We use the term distribution when we talk about articles published in traditional journals. While scientific publishing industry should guarantee research outcomes to be available and accessible to anyone and scholarly outputs should be the essential gateway for the dissemination of scientific discoveries, nowadays the distribution is a privilege reserved to those who can afford it through payment. Today, the role of scientific journals is not only to disseminate knowledge, but also to exert quality control. Between 1975 and 19995, subscription fees to scientific journals have raised 7,3% per year on average and publishers’ expectation in the emergence of digital publishing have been let down because digital publishing decreased prices only 10/20%. The birth of the Web and the digital revolution lead to the removal of typographic, storage and distribution charges but the current situation is more and more dramatic. The consequences of this state–of-the-art are the creation of consortia for the purchase and the Big Deal formula. Nowadays, there are three different models of publishing process: the traditional model based on subscriptions, the author pays model and the pay-per-use model where you pay fees for the download. This presentation explores in detail the phases of a typical publishing process focusing on the issues concerning with the impact factor and the peer-review system. With regard to scientific publishing at the international and world-wide level, in the world there are more or less 23.000 scientific journals with publish every year an amount of 1.4 millions of articles. Nevertheless, journals’ distribution within the scientific publishing market is quite unbalanced because two publishers, namely Elsevier and Springler, own 2000 journals each and 11 publishers (the 2%) produce more than the 70% of journals in this group. New models of scholarly communication, supported by new economic models for scientific publishing, should be created. These new models should assure the public access to publicly funded research and an equal competition in the market between different economic publishing models.