RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The research questions driving this project are the following:

1) Humanities are at a crossroad in what concerns publication cultures, and it is yet to be determined how they will "communicate themselves" preferentially in the future.

2) Presently, several and distinct publication modes coexist in Humanities and Social Sciences, some just emerging, and it is not clear which of these will gain preponderance in the future: ink-stained books; publishing in peer reviewed journals indexed to data-bases producing bibliometrical outputs; digital publishing; open access e-books and e-articles; print-on-demand books, both digital and ink-stained; multimedia products, data-bases, hyper-text, and other complex objects.

3) It is far from being done the assessment of the impact of dominant publishing modes in the R&D direction, either concerning its content (what is investigated) either concerning the way as it is presented. This matter is especially important if we acknowledge that, in most cases, there is nowadays a direct relation between the evaluation and financing of R&D, and the production of information and data supporting a fair and productive allocation of resources (or at least an allocation that can easily be audited and justified); and that among this information for the management of R&D resources, bibliometric or 'scientometric' data, which claim to evaluate the impact of research, are ever more popular. As a result, publication modalities can shape decisively a field or scientific area, and it is our belief that from the resolution of the tension between open acces / indexed journals, which is for the most undecided and an open question, will spring much of the configuration and future relevance of Human and Social Sciences.

4) In other words, this project assumes the dispute between emerging and traditional publication modes is far from being resolved in the humanities, and that the result of the quarrel is still undecided. The project intends to show, summoning the intervenient to a serious reflection on these matters, that there are substantial differences in Humanities publication modalities when compared to Sciences, and that this matter is of extreme relevance, for publication cultures on the making today, will bear a decisive impact in the configuration of those sciences in the future.