Scientific publications

Step by step permanent development of digital libraries (DL) concept is forming a particular virtual research environment. Successfulness of international initiative for open access to research is creating conditions to use DL and related research environment as common research practice. It creates some important challenges for DL developers. If, in the future, DL of all research organizations are federated as universal research data and information space (DIS), how can research community exploit the emerged systemic effect to produce maximal benefits? How should we construct, in form and function, a system for shaping and sharing research results from local DL so as to provide maximal usage? How should we organize a process of research results usage, and design necessary tools to provide maximally comprehensive and accurate statistics on the uptake, usage and impact of research results? How should the DL and the research environment accumulate and process statistics to generate new online metrics sufficient for research assessment of higher quality, sensitivity, breadth, accuracy, reliability, and validity than current metrics? Analysis of possible in such context DL development trends shows an ability to appear a new efficient organization form for research activities. We called it as Open Science.