Will Be Access to Scientific Publications Free For All?

Author: Jaroslav Šilhánek,  Institute of Chemical Technology, Czech Republic

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Abstract

Situation in scientific publishing presently reached the stage of being a subject of governments and parliaments agenda and it is possible to say that despite that problems are negotiated for only limited time span we can see some surprising results. To understand the whole situation it is necessary to analyse the infrastructure of publishing industry and to realize all important aspects and possibility to influence them. But it is also important to note that scientific publishing has some aspects different from aspects influencing production of most other products and these facts strongly complicate prediction of behaviour of market subjects. On the information production side it is strongly domain of not-for- profit institutions, but typical not-for-profit customer, the research or university library, is very limited by their budgets. On the other hands it is an area offering very high profit from capital investment, which attracts strong investors. And as it is typical for not-for-profit environment strong players are funding organizations, both private and state. But in all cases it is now clear that for the long time conservative publishing system would change and it seems quite probable that the target in title of this presentation would be step-by-step fulfilled.

About the author

After graduation from the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology he obtained his PhD in organic technology from the same institution in 1968. Starting carrier as an organic chemist mostly in areas of pesticides and organic sulphur compounds chemistry he has been steadily engaged in the fields of chemical information and particularly in its electronic forms. He wrote a couple of teaching text on this subject and he is lecturing courses on Chemical Informatics on the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. He has about 70 papers, patents and review papers in local and international journals and gave a couple of plenary lectures on Online Meeting in London (1997, 1999) as well as at the largest chemical congress Achema in Frankfurt am Main on the subject of management of chemical information and searching problems. He is also author of a couple of projects on promotion of widespread access to the most important chemical databases for all chemical or natural science faculties in the Czech Republic.