Online Publishing as a Support for Scholarly Communication in Dynamic Knowledge Communities

Internet based services, particularly asynchronous communication services, offer an environment suited to the rise of knowledge communities. Knowledge communities, or invisible colleges, have existing for a long time, but have not always had efficient ways of communication. Knowledge communities are heavily dynamic and are always changing in their composition and also in each member interests. The intersection of the interests of a given number of elements creates the environment for the rising of a community. Nevertheless, this community will benefit not by the intersection but by the union of knowledge of these elements. On the other hand, multiple overlapping communities are generated and one persons set of interests includes some intersection with the interests of several knowledge communities. These communities are rather fluid and dynamic and the old processes for scholarly communication don’t seem to fairly represent these properties. Digital Libraries projects keep appearing throughout the world. Paper printed journals and proceedings are beginning to be also distributed electronically. Online scientific journals are starting to be taken seriously by scientists and by some of the major scientific publishers. Nevertheless, online documentation per se doesn’t address the dynamic behavior of knowledge communities. Also, the problem of the undiscovered public knowledge (as called by Don Swanson) still tends to remain unattended. Most of the times we have been using old processes to solve new problems. In our opinion, to address these issues, an online scholarly publication should have the following goals: 1. Promote the generation of knowledge communities composed of elements coming from different scientific communities promote interdisciplinarity assuming it is a key factor on discovering public knowledge, 2. Promote, develop and maintain the communication between elements of a knowledge community,