Jacinto Dávila

It is a very good summary of the process of science and the publication of results. However, it fails to deepen our understanding of possible solutions. Preprints and publishing processes led by scientists are already used but struggle to be accepted...

Open Access is a global cause with the aim of allowing unrestricted access to all scientific research output in electronic formats. This paper presents a model for simulating the game of interests behind this cause in order to investigate ways of promoting the practice of open access. The model represents the following actors: Academics, Administrators, Funders, Publishers and Politicians. Five scenarios were developed to represent both realistic and ideal, interesting, situations. The model was developed using the SocLab platform—a formalization of the sociology of organizational action. It is based on previous descriptions of the game and expert knowledge. A structural analysis permits us to examine the properties of the sub-model behind each scenario. The results corroborate certain intuitions about the scenarios representing realistic cases, e.g., they indicate that publishers, being isolated in their interests, are subject to strong pressures from other actors, who have a circumstantial alliance. Administrators take an intermediate stance in all scenarios. The best scenarios for open access are those in which Politicians and Funders clearly support the cause by expressing mandates in that direction, backing academics. Surprisingly, the model shows that it is in the Publishers’ interest not to take an extremist position against open access.

"Publish or Perish" is a good name for those organizational policies that force researchers to publish because their statistics are used as an indicators of productivity and efficiency. It is like asking students in a classroom to say something, any...

Blockchains are specialized, distributed databases that bring a fundamental feature to computer systems: immutability. This feature alone has triggered the development of financial systems that can be fully automated and can be partially or completely independent from human management. The possibility of self-regulated agreements between well informed parties, known as smart contracts, becomes the core of those financial systems. However, smart contracts depend, not only on the development of a strong cryptographic infrastructure, but also in the ability of the parties to actually encode their corresponding requirements and concessions, and their trust, into the computer systems. A new generation of programming languages seems to be required.

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. Evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. This article aims to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies. We address issues around preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, predatory publishers, and the legitimacy of ‘global’ databases. These arguments and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and will inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system.

Information technology development is a must for societies in the whole world and, particularly, in the so-called third world. However, which particular research goal and which mode of research are suitable for that development are questions that need careful consideration and reasoning. In this chapter, we try to explore those reasons by visiting the logic in Free, Libre, Open Source Software, FLOSS, as a general concept. It is a political logic, because it clearly interferes and is interfered by dominant economical policies with respect to issues such as knowledge diffusion, copyrights and intellectual property. In the chapter, we explore available evidence over which principles are actually held and how that is done. Our highest goal, however, is to show that information technologies are best understood in the wider context of socio-political games and any suggestion of the opposite is itself a move in some of those games.

This paper aims to show a multi-agent geosimulation for a water distribution system that has been designed and developed according to the conceptual and methodological guidelines that dictates a theoretical reference model presented in [1]. The domain of geosimulación system is in the field of Disaster Management and Risk Reduction, The system is oriented to public service and simulates the occurrence of changes in the dynamics of rain on a particular geography that could mean periods of drought. The construction of the system is a planned process of reuse of complete and entire architectures. For this purpose have been used for the construction of the experimental framework, functional simulation system as EpaNet and GALATEA, GIS such as gvSIG, and system integration architectures for distributed simulation such as HLA.

The authors bring a notion called articulated planning that defies existing associations between centralised government approaches and socialism. With increasing availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the authors argue that governmental processes can be facilitated and develop more participative planning efforts towards developing e-governance in countries. The free software and simulation tools can contribute to generate appropriate spaces for citizens’ participation in, definition and supervision of government plans.