Ciencia y sociedad: Un nuevo reto para los profesionales de la documentación

Abstract

Various models of scientific knowledge production have recently highlighted that the scientific community holds a growing responsibility towards society, both for establishing scientific priorities and for producing useful knowledge. However, the information science community, despite promoting open access to the scientific literature, keeps sticking to an elitist concept of scientific information sources, as they are conceived within a scientific communication system which is closed and intended to sustain information exchange among peers. This article analyzes four possible scenarios in which science and society may get closer, and propose for each of them a possible role for information professionals. To this end, we revise briefly the growing literature on citizens accessing scientific information.