Open Access: challenging the norm in academia

Science communication is undergoing a considerable evolution in the Internet era. Open Access is at last letting researchers, scholars and students in developing countries acquire full access to scientific knowledge. Nowadays, this represents a bit less than half of the scientific literature, the other half being still hidden behind paywalls and unaffordable by them. Unfortunately, in order to preserve their highly profitable business model, the major publishing companies are flipping the model from "pay to read" to "pay to publish". This is the most important threat for African and other developing countries: the price to pay for reading freely is the loss of opportunity to communicate. A truly democratic future, at the international level, calls for publicly run open publication platforms accessible to all, submitted to open reviewing and immediately accessible. This novel communication tool can only be attractive upon two conditions: 1) it must be attractive enough so that the researchers become aware of the advantages it provides in terms of audience, visibility and potential citations; 2) the research/researcher evaluation processes must take the new paradigm in consideration and quit using the current indirect metrics (proxys) such as the journals impact factor. However, this indispensable change in the evaluation tradition must be adopted worldwide and at the same time if no scientific community, particularly the young generation, is to be sacrificed.