Scientific Publications: The Role of Public Administrations in the ICT Era

International audienceICT (Information and Communication Technologies) have radically changed the ecosystem of scientific publishing andhave sparked a growing conflict of interest between the publishing houses on the one hand and all the other players on theother. After an in-depth analysis of the minimum requirements of a scientific publishing system and the divorce that istaking place between authors, users, and publishing houses due to the ICT driven revolution, this article describes whatthe scientific community can do, and in fact has already started to do, to free themselves from the now unjustified yokeimposed by the publishing houses. But all of this would be in vain without an immediate, clear, and determined interven-tion from Public Administrations, which we would ask to have the political courage to define public policies in order toplace in the public domain what has been out of it for too long. We ask this for the sake of the common good, and have puttogether a specific proposal that would require no extra funding and that would not be limited to the so-called ‘hard’sciences, but would aim to address a problem that has already spread to all areas of research