Cyberscience, Academic Publishing and the Law
Cyberscience, Academic Publishing and the Law

Summary/Abstract: The term “cyberscience” surely needs an explanation. First we have to admit that this compound word, consisting of cyber (i.e relating to cyberspace) and science, is not our own invention but that of Michael Nentwich, who examined in which manner the creating and development of information technologies had been influencing research in the sciences and the humanities.1 In his words Cyberscience is “what researchers do in the cyberspace” namely “everything related to Academia which takes place in this new type of virtual space”.2 To define in detail according to Nentwich: “Traditional academics either travelled in ‘thought spaces’ or in real places. Cyberscientists, by contrast, spend a lot of time not only in these, but also in new virtual spaces. Information rooms spread out before them by online databases; chat rooms or discussion lists, where they meet and communicate electronically with fellow researchers; digital libraries which deliver documents in bits and bytes […] Cyberscience technologies help to transcend real space. It is this strong relationship between these technologies and space which makes it advisable not to use just the prefix “e” electronic, like in ‘e-science’. The connotations of ‘cyber’ are more appropriate in our context science cyberscience is about more than electronic ways of doing science”.

• Details
• Contents