Читать книгу Information Practices and Knowledge in Health - Группа авторов - Страница 16

The field of Health is currently in a period in which the issues of publishing and disseminating validated scientific information have perhaps never been so crucial. The Covid-19 health crisis has demonstrated its importance as well as its complexity.

Open Access is largely part of this complexity, through a political injunction, which is carried by not only public research organizations but also public and private funding agencies. The latter now intervene directly in the determination of dissemination models and in the legitimization of new models of scientific communication. What we are witnessing in Health is the redefinition of a model of scientific publication that is more directly linked to the organization and financing of research.

The Covid-19 pandemic has suggested possible channels of scientific communication that are becoming independent of the journal model in favor of near-real-time dissemination of articles on preprint servers. Research “in the making” requires an acceleration for which journals are not ready; it therefore turns to platforms that play the role of intermediary device, facilitating and accelerating dissemination.

The question of scientific validation, and thus of peer review, remains the ultimate lock allowing journals to keep their central place in the scientific communication system, and giving information its guarantees of integrity and credibility. But here again, recent events, such as the LancetGate affair, illustrate^20,21 to what extent the walls of scientific publishing are becoming increasingly cracked in the field of Health. The rise of predatory journals and the phenomenon of Fake Science in recent years question more broadly the status of scientific soundness, integrity and credibility of scientific and medical information that circulates on the Web and that affects both scientific communities and the general public.

Open Access to scientific information in Health has not only improved the dissemination and circulation of scientific information but also reshuffled the cards of the game between stakeholders, allowing some of them, notably the research communities and funding agencies, to take a more important part in the definition of models that are better able to take care of the imperatives of contemporary scientific practice.