Open Access Initiatives: The Inevitable Business Process Reengineering and Revolutions in Open Scholarly Communication

Abstract

Advances in science comprising the pure, applied, humanities and the social sciences historically vouch the collaborative and the communicative processes involved in the scholarly world. This has been the practice the world over for centuries and this (has to) will continue to be so in future too. Scholarly communication by means of scientific journals, research reports, short communications (letters), conference/symposia proceedings, monographs etc. have gone so deep into the world of scientific communication since long and it has grown into an institution by itself. The scholarly communication system has been, for the past several hundred years, largely monopolised by the publishers. An exemption here would be the learned society publishers, who mostly do not handle scholarly literature with a profit motive. Publishers also take away the copyright of the author while accepting their manuscripts for publication, freely, and the paradox is that the author or his university/i...