Introduction

Why this book, why this book now and why this subtitle? These seem valid questions, as recently quite a number of books have been published on publishing, and in particular scientific publishing (Cope and Philips, 2006, 2009; Kist, 2008). Most of these books deal with changes in technology and their consequences for scientific publishing and archiving, as we have seen these over the past decade. In this book we take a different approach, albeit that we also take technological changes as our starting point. However, the purpose is not to analyse changes in publishing, but first to analyse what these technology changes mean for doing science, i.e. for the research process as it has developed and will further develop as e-science. E-science will no doubt enhance science; one could argue that e-science also stands for enhanced science.1 The consequences for scientific publishing will be discussed on the basis of this analysis of the changes in science and in the research process in particular.

In a previous book (Roosendaal et al., 2005) we formulated a vision for the scientific information market, a vision that according to the present authors still holds today:

The research and higher education information market will in future be based on a network of information relating to research and education that conform to open standards, and an accommodating architecture that allows users the easiest and fastest possible access to this information.

The information available by such a network will not only comprise of information material for research and higher education, but also of management information relating to this information.

The market is the research and higher education community. This network will be an open and global network.

In the scientific community, this vision is generally shared. It describes in essence an information network for research and education. This network should contain both research and education information in the widest sense. This means also management information to support access to and disclosure of the information. The user, student, teacher or researcher should be able to make use of this information from any site, at any time and in all possible ways. And the network should allow the user to integrate the information into his or her daily working processes.

This universal vision has driven and will continue to drive the market for research and higher education information and, as a consequence, the business models in this market. Engines for change supporting better fulfilment of this vision have always triggered and will continue to trigger changes in the business model.

E-science is seen as a further step towards the all-time ideal of universal sharing of scientific results. What kind of incentives will be required to attain this goal of making research information an ever more integral part of the research process? Back in the 1990s there was already some speculation on the consequences for the research process of what we now call e-science or cyber-science. It was widely speculated that e-science, the term we will use throughout this book, could increase the turnover rate of science to make the process more effective and efficient. Such an increase is badly needed, given the fact that for more than three centuries the productivity per scientist has not increased while at the same time most countries, except for China and India, have exhausted the full potential in the population that can reasonably be expected to enjoy higher education. And higher education is a necessary condition in the training of a scientist. Moreover, China and India will exhaust their potential pretty soon as well. This means that if we just want to prolong the present rate of knowledge production, and this is what our present society seems to require, we need to find ways to increase the productivity per scientist - taking into account that, in particular in the production of knowledge, the law of diminishing returns applies mercilessly. One way of increasing the capacity for the production of knowledge is to reduce redundancies in the research process. To attain this requires more efficient and more transparent communication of research results. Also, if the number of multiples (Merton, 1973), i.e. the almost simultaneous inventions by disparate researchers and not resulting from imitation or plagiarism, could be reduced by improved communication, substantial research capacity could possibly be freed, resulting in higher productivity per researcher. And as we are witnessing already today, e-science is an important driver to boost interdisciplinary research, and interdisciplinary research is probably the most important source for the production of new knowledge. Nanoscience may serve as a non-exhaustive example here.

These are just a few of the many good reasons to explore the possibilities e-science has to offer us. The gist is that e-science is a further step in making research information the integral raw material in the research process, as it should be. In e-science it will be possible to share primary data much more efficiently with other researchers, allowing for new schemes of division of labour, e.g. splitting up collecting data in an advanced way from analysing these same data and so on, as is daily practice in high-energy physics. A condition, of course, is that we can find innovative ways of giving credit where credit is due, as a necessary incentive for sharing information at such an early phase in the research process. No doubt some sciences will seize the opportunity to become more data driven, as was anticipated for biology by Maddox (1998) and advocated by Popper (1963) for the social sciences to become a mature discipline. We have seen this happening very clearly in the Human Genome Project and other forms of cell biology.

These few examples may illustrate the claim that new technology will not only change the way research results will be reported, but also change the research process next to science itself. However, this is not a new claim. Throughout history we have seen how the possibilities promised by new technology were readily seized by the scientific community to improve the efficacy and efficiency of the research process. A case in point is the invention of the research journal in 1665, made possible by the novel distribution channel provided by the postal services of the seventeenth century. The research journal was badly needed to improve the phasing of the researchers of those days, and led to fundamental changes in the research process of that time. The main function of the journal was to improve communication between researchers to the benefit of all, as it was clear to everyone that science could only flourish by collaboration in sharing results: do ut des. Beyond communication, at the same time the journal allowed researchers to claim an invention,22 a function journals still perform and which has developed into a more formal role as an archive of research articles - the emphasis has shifted from communication required for researchers to remain in phase to more formal registration (Roosendaal et al., 2005).

This development has seduced some to speak about 'vanity publishing', and some publishers may well have built their strategies on this concept. E-science, if living up to its promises, must mark the end of 'vanity publishing' and publishers' strategies; rather, it must develop new research and communication strategies with the goal of improving the production of new knowledge. Researchers will have to develop clear strategies for doing research and collaborating in the research environment with their colleagues, as well as with society at large. Publishing strategies should support and therefore facilitate these researchers' strategies.

Based on this thought, this book will first discuss research using the concept of the business model as guidance to analyse the research environment, competition in research and drivers for making research results public and acquisition of these results by other researchers. This will create the foundation to discuss pertinent criteria for business models in scientific publishing, and to develop scenarios for publishing and their consequences for all stakeholders, researchers, publishers and librarians alike. The book will endeavour to speculate on the consequences for the business model of research and higher education (R&HE) institutions as e-science opens up new possibilities for collaboration in projects across such institutions. In particular, this will create new challenges for smaller and medium-sized institutions to participate in such collaborations. E-science promises new possibilities for the production of knowledge and, as we have seen from the few examples given above, will most probably change our research agenda of the future.

This research agenda is to a great extent determined by the rather delicate relation between research and society at large. This relation is presently in flux, moving towards an increasing intertwinement of research and society. Researchers and practitioners involved in this discussion elaborate on the future roles of university and society in the production of knowledge, and it is obvious that e-science nowadays plays a special part in this discussion. The subject of the production of knowledge has been addressed in a number of papers and journal issues (Hodgkinson, 2001; Leydesdorff and Meyer, 2006). In 1999 Gibbons explicitly raised the need for a...