Making knowledge accessible is our mission.
We also believe that ‘traditional’ publishing modes are an interesting tool if you want to reach a non-academic target.
It may sound counterintuitive, but to have an impactful spreading of contents, it is not enough to make them available on platforms
It is not just a matter of access costs or technicalities, metadata and files. Effective interactions between content creators (authors) and communities of users (in particular professionals) are required.
It is a cognitive issue: filling the gap between producers of cultural codes and users is essential. To do so, several players should cooperate and interact. If authors are the source of contents, the contribution of a third subject (autonomous and specifically skilled) helps reduce the risks of self-referentiality and aggregate the scattered voices of users. These are the skills we make available to our authors and community.
Open access: the golden and green way
We believe that in humanistic and social studies, the ‘value decay’ of an academic content happens with a different timing and mode, compared to medical, scientific, and technological subjects. According to our experience, this deeply influences the spreading modalities (much more diluted in time) and the potential to use upstream or downstream resources (far less in number) for search results.
Considered these specific aspects, the Open Access protocol, represented by the so-called green way (normally with a 6 to 24 months embargo), is an intrinsically hybrid solution, generally sustainable for social and humanistic studies.
On the other hand, we believe that the so-called golden way can be applied to our disciplines (that is, open access since work publication).
To know more: Open Access, the FrancoAngeli solution