A PEER-TO-PEER APPLICATION SYSTEMFOR THE SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

The number of scientific journals and thereby the number of published articles grew with an enormousrate in the last century (e.g. Price 1986; Henderson 2002). In the second half of the 20th century thesystem seemed to abut against its boundaries, because in relation to research budgets, library budgetsdid not grow fast enough to cover all the scientific output produced. Price increases well above theinflation rate set by commercial publishers that bundle disproportionately high market power –especially for journals in the Science-Technical-Medicine-Sector in the last thirty years – intensifiedthe situation even further. This situation is known as the serial crisis. New Information andCommunication Technology (ICT) driven publication models are established and seem to be apromising way out of the crisis because they reduce distribution costs significantly. Especially theopen access (OA) movement that advocates free electronic access to scientific output is subject to afierce public debate. In this paper we will detail problems associated with OA and suggest a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) system that supports electronic scholarly communication as a tool to address the economicproblems mentioned above.....