Alternative publishing: Overview of Open Archives Initiatives

Abstract

Since “Open Archives” can in principle be discussed in different contexts, let us start by stating that we will limit ourselves to the context of scholarly communication. What do we mean by that? As a pragmatic definition, scientific communication (or scholarly communication) is the set of processes through which the outcome of (academic) research is distributed and archived for the benefit of present and future researchers and scholars. Its essential ingredients and aims are the publication of (new) scientific information and its quality control (QC) (e.g.: peer review).