Re-engineering the scientific knowledge management process: the SciX project

In the past, paper-based publications were both the medium for the information exchange among the scientists as well as the measure of their scientific quality. Recently electronic publication is increasingly important for the dissemination of scientific work, while evaluation of scientists and institutions remains largely based on the printed publications. In the ‘‘material world’’, associations, such as eCAADe have been providing a stage for getting the right people together and through annual conferences and seminars made sure that research results were heard and read. The Internet and the Web are allowing the scientists to pursue those activities on their own or through flexibly organized ‘‘virtual’’ associations. Electronic publications also provide a basis for efficient management of scientific knowledge—discovering related work, reduction of the duplicate efforts, establishment of virtual research teams etc. In this paper, we present the goals and initial results of an EU-project called SciX: ‘‘Open, Self Organising Repository for Scientific Information Exchange’’. The goal of SciX is to analyze the business processes of scientific publishing, to invent new publication models and through a series of pilots to demonstrate how this will work. In the envisioned scenarios, professional associations such as eCAADe play an important role. Their members are the potential users of SciX’s platforms, authors and readers of the papers. Associations could also become the publishers and archivists of the knowledge created within their respective community. The objectives of this contribution focus on involving the eCAADe-community in the developments in SciX, on fine-shaping the goals, as well as on defining the requirements and monitoring the usability of the pilots