By Fabio Marzella
Communication is a fundamental activity for the researchers. In addition to the necessity of exchanging information, authors want to be recognized for their research into the scientific community.
Those particular functions are granted by scientific journals, with peer review process, that, with the publication of articles accepted by referees, let anybody know, in theory, the results of current research.
However, since 1970, prices of scientific journals began to increase more than the CPI (Consumer Price Index). This situation brought libraries to talk about crisis: Journals Crisis.
A wide number of solutions and initiatives has been proposed by scholars, publishers, librarians, administrators and other stakeholders, all linked with the introduction of the Internet. There are two main initiatives that we can point out. The first one, which we could call Free Access, is generally a Digital Archive that collects articles, if published or not it depends on archive. The second one is a journal, according to the traditional scheme of a printed journal, that uses exclusively the electronic mean (that reduces costs and increases accessibility).
Those intiatives involves Scholarly Communication, discussing the way scientific articles are sold and distributed, and at the same time changing the scientist’s perception of one of the most important process that rules the research evaluation: Peer Review.
