Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
A debate that has been diluted in recent years is the controversy surrounding the privileged or exclusive channel of the diffusion of scientific research. Until no more than two decades ago, online or virtual magazines were discredited and many national scientific evaluation agencies did not value the contributions in these channels, or considered them second level, from a reasoning today unexplained that these media were of inferior rank in front of the printed edition that had remained unchanged from the very begginning of the conception of the scientific journals and even more, in the DNA of the publication and of the bookby itself, in the G
utenberg press.
Today we have gone almost to the other extreme. It is not easy to find librarians who say that their centers do not receive printed magazines if they have electronic editions, as if both were not compatible and even more, complementary and necessary. Many experts in librarianship bet for the double channel for prestigious journals and with history. It is ilogical to think that an OJS platform with all its virtualities (which are immense in version 3.0) can easily replace the printed editorial background of a magazine with category and many «printed» pages and stories.
It is evident that it is not about defending past archeology, but rather locating the value of the different channels for scientific diffusion. Online journals have acquired an immense potential for all the advantages of the Internet and for the applications that have been developed for their management, both in the revision and editing as well as in the editing processes. This is not incompatible with maintaining printed editions with a long editing history that expand their coverage and are library funds with immense value.
The future of the written edition is not written yet. Some negatives of librarianship already augur the end of the magazines, at least we already live a blurring of the role of the headers. Today, «magazines» are no longer consulted, but rather single articles in the «cloud» through their keywords. These macro-bases have not already erased the unitary sense of the publication? Scientific social networks also diffuse the work in isolation, blurring their initial headings and acquiring these only value based on the prestige of their citation.
It is evident that the scientific world is transforming itself in leaps and bounds, like almost the whole world. In this sense, scientific diffusion is also revolutionizing all the standards and the very concept of the scientific journal that is less and less like the classic printed book. This is an open and exciting debate … in the meantime we defend our future with our past and our present. Printed magazines, online magazines, global magazines…
