Help
Languages
 |  |
Project Page
| Back | Top | Next |
Antecedents
Next, we will give some subjects related with the nature of this project that will help to understand its reason of being and the motivations behind.
The scientific publications are important by 3 fundamental factors:
- They allow that a researcher receives criticisms, to his work, from
other researchers of the same area, generating a feedback process that
improves the scientific work.
- They allow that new researchers begin their work based on others already made and do not start every research from scratch.
- They allow to evaluate the quality of the activity of scientists by means of the impact of their publications, which is moderated generally by 2 factors; first it is the publication on a magazine of great prestige in the field and the second is the number of references from other researchers to their work.
The prices of the magazines on the last 10 years have increased their prices every year between 12% and 16%. This has meant that worldwide universities and libraries have begun to cancel titles of magazines in a massive form, because it is already to them impossible to assume these prices. This is more visible in the Third World Countries universities where the expenses in research and education tend to the loss. The problem is so, that great American and European universities have even reduced more than 21% of the contemplated expenses for the acquisition of magazines.
This problem has arrived to some scientists and professors members of scientific committees in magazines of prestige and, knowledgeable of this crazy increase of prices, have left the committees of the magazines themselves since they do not agree in returning to pay by a knowledge of which the university already was proprietor and of course, they do not accept the absurd that has arrived, in where in some cases, are the own researchers those who must pay to the magazines so that their works can be published.
In the presence of this situation, certain scientists' groups are fomenting alternative projects based on the edition of scientific electronic magazines with free or low cost with access via Internet. Even the universities or researchers' groups are returning to publish their magazines without the needed of intermediaries. It is beginning to extend the opinion that is due to take more advantage of the WWW, been born in the universities and research centers, the way to develop a new diffusion of the Science.
It is in this context that appears ScienSe, which is a Free Software that tries to contribute to solve the diffusion problem of the Science, particularly of those publications of scientific character. Free software took exactly the scientific philosophy of sharing and now the Science can take advantage of this model in order to solve a problem that worries, more everyday, to the scientific communities anywhere in the world.
Although, other aimed projects have arisen to solve this problem, ScienSe combines free software with the idea to make of free access the scientific publications and will base it success on the power of scientists' and free software programmers' collaboration.
News
| Begin Project | 2004/04/11 |
|---|
Resources
| Product Information | Description, features, system requirements |
|---|---|
| Screenshots | Screenshots of Sciense |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Downloads | Download related software |
Search By Google
|
|
