Producing and Communicating Scientific Knowledge: Current Challenges in the Academia

Abstract

Since the early days of scientific publishing, scholars chose journals to
share their work and trusted publishers with a key role in the diffusion of knowledge. In
time, the revenues, profit, and prestige of commercial publishers grew, so did their prices
and control over the market. Today, the scholar publishing market is concentrated in a
few major publishing houses and scientists are victims of a numerical and statistical
assessment. In fact, the expansion of information and communication technologies, with
the Worldwide Web, enabled ultra-fast and effective communication. However, the
academic community did not seem to capitalise on these developments. This paper
analyses the current state of the scholar publishing market, the misuse of the impact
factor, and presents the benefits of Open Science as a systemic effort towards a more
reliable, effective, and equitable knowledge system.