OACS - Open Access Communication for Science

The effects of the Internet on the scientific publishing process (research, publication, ownership, archiving, indexing, retrieval and use) will be studied in the project. The focus will be on new business models enabling free electronic access to the primary scientific knowledge for researchers, university students, companies as well as the general public. The fundamental research question is whether such Open Access business models (financed by "open source"-like voluntary work, author charges, grants etc) provide a re-engineered value chain which is radically more cost-effective and offers wider availability of the results of science than the currently dominating model, which is based on expensive subscriptions or site licenses to content given away for free by academic authors to a few large commercial publishers. In addition to the life-cycle economics the inertia in moving from the currently prevailing system to alternative Open Access outlets (electronic peer reviewed journals, preprint and institutional repositories) will be a focus of the study.