— by Tobias Kuhn, 4 April 2022; reporting on work with Cristina Bucur, Davide Ceolin, and Jacco van Ossenbruggen [1,2] —
I believe we have made the first steps venturing into a new era of scientific publishing. Let me explain. [Update: At what point exactly a new era begins and what counts as first steps are of course subject to debate. I therefore added a section on related initiatives and further reading below.]
Science is nowadays communicated in a digital manner through the internet. We essentially have a kind of "scientific knowledge cloud", where researchers with the help of publishers upload their latest findings in the form of scientific articles, and where everybody who is interested can access and retrieve these findings. (This is in fact only true for articles that are published as Open Access, but that is not the point here.)