Not at all. I agree that the publisher/consumer model brought
about by the dissemination of "web browsers" is a tragedy.
The web is supposed to be so much more collaborative.
> Wasn't the Web project supposed to help scientific publishing and
>knowledge sharing ?
Knowledge sharing, yes. Scientific publishing? Only as a specific
instance of the general problem.
> I've already asked about Web Scientific Publishing a
>few months ago but could someone point out the STATE OF THE ART, for what
>concerns scientific research fields, at the end of this year ?
I'd also like to see a report on that. Keep track of what Eric Miller
at OCLC is up to (surf around www.oclc.org for a while). Also, the
folks at O'Reilly and Elsevier.
> What are the
>perspective of WEB Scientific Publishing ? Are there "central" concerted,
>cooperative or collaborative projects concerning sharing and diffusion of
>scientific publications ?
Also look into the digital library projects. I'm sorry I don't have
any good references handy. Would someone who does please follow up?
> Big archive and mirror sites such as Info-Mac, are working on the basis
>of collaborative feeding of central servers, can we imagine to set up
>something equivalent for scientific publications ?
Have you seen the UCSTRI? (check yahoo/lycos/altavista)
> Can we hope that the W3C
>consortium will focuse on scientific usage, for publication and knowledge
>diffusion, of the Web now that its commercial usage is in good shape :-) ?
You can expect that W3C will focus on knowledge representation
and collaboration. See:
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/Activity
But we have no stated bias toward scientific use. In fact, my personal
goal is every-day commerce: I want to renew my driver's license
using the web one day. See:
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/ECommerceEval.html
>Why not opening the W3C to pool of scientists (such as Rzepa's ChemMIME
>group of researchers) ?
I'm not sure what you mean. W3C is open to all sorts of folks.
In my opinion, scientific publishing is one of the least urgent
concerns for the web. A web browser with ghostview or a PDF viewer,
plus directory and abstracting services like UCSTRI serve the need
very well. The folks that need the web for sci. pub. are experts and
can handle unpolished software.
The only thing missing is guarantees of availability of documents, and
good catalogue numbering systems (URNs). For promising developments,
see the STANF and path papers cited at:
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Addressing/
Dan