I was deeply satisfied that the number of Thursday's Ciberpaís reused the debate on scientific publications, scientists, libraries and Internet publishing "free Internet access to scientific publications. This was a post that was saved as futuristic and this time, a great means of communication are ahead of us ... But we do a bit of memory based on the article by Martinez Dídac crisis in scientific journals and the new opportunities the Internet ...

Philosophical Transactions is published by the Royal Society of London in 1665, is considered the first scientific journal edited. This publication arose from the need of exchanging ideas and revising scientific papers by experts. He soon added the necessity of collecting all letters and, thus, the New Scientist should not start again. This led to the birth of scientific libraries as we conceive today. Throughout this period of time we have added new elements to assess the quality of published papers, and the impact they produce in the scientific community, which allows the researcher to assess if your work gets published in the journal more remarkable in its field and is cited by other researchers.

For years, were the very institutions that published their journals, but the explosion of scientific communication after World War II due to increased specialization and experimentation increased the number of publications that were external to any academy. The researchers began a free transfer their work to publishers so that they were published. During the 70s, the number of titles available in the market was the largest in history, according to the Science Citation Index, and in some areas was passed to publish 50 titles in the 30 over 1000.

Publishers providing quality content, stability in the publication and distribution of collections, the immediate consequence of this growth was the massive subscription journals by academic libraries. However, this evolution in scientific communication is coming to an end due mainly to the gradual growth and excessive price of subscriptions to journals each year, around 12% -, causing cancellation of the universities not have sufficient resources to continue this pace, then came the electronic journals. These magazines are providing many advantages to the researcher, including a faster search of information, the possibility of managing and sending texts, the exchange of views, access to electronic summaries or pre-print files ... all the advantages that some paper journals are edited leaving.

At first, it was considered that the prices of electronic journals would begin to decline as the costs were lower, but not being well and e-journals continue the same price hike. Given this, researchers, librarians and computer scientists are promoting projects that are based on a new communication without intermediaries and free access. In this way, it seeks to recover what was theirs and that always comes from public investment, laboratories and researchers.

But what projects are underway:

1. Statements in favor of open access to information, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Open Archives Initiative, the Public Library of Science, supported by more than 30,000 scholars from 175 countries, or the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), electronic journal that publishes academic pricing.
2. Offer open servers where authors and research groups deposited for free or low cost consultation Articles to the other scientists. Are the open archives, whose success runs like wildfire through the world scientific community: Pubmed Central, BioMedCentral, British Medical Journal on biomedical sciences, the H-NET on the humanities, the Public Knowledge Project on Education, Chemistry Pre-print Server chemistry , RePEc economics or devised by Paul Ginspar in 1991, Los Alamos Preprint Archive (arXiv) - specializing in physics.
3. Creating library consortia to jointly buy electronic journals to more stable prices and sustainable.

Ultimately, all projects for improvement, but very significant. A prolonged crisis of scientific journals be detrimental to the dissemination and development of science itself, putting further endanger the democratic access to knowledge that ensure and provide libraries and scientific circuit excluding those communities with few resources or little scientific tradition established. The Network is changing the scientific communication and gives us a unique opportunity we must seize.