Communicating Science: a Modern Event

Abstract

Science is by its very nature an intersubjective, public, collaborative and democratic (at least in principle) enterprise. The modern scholar of nature, in fact, cannot but communicate first of all to his/her colleagues the results of his/her research, since, in the final analysis, science is a socially shared and socially validated corpus of knowledge. The results of research must therefore be made public but non only among the specialists. The modern way of communicating science has triggered a progressively accelerating circulation of documents (rather than researchers), reversing a more than secular trend in which scholars reached the places where knowledge was deposited and archived. The modern databases, that host books, newspaper and periodicals like actual libraries and are accessible online, represent the last expression of this inverted mobility between documents and consultants.