Issues of “Hypermediating Journals” for Scientific Publishing

In this chapter, we will consider new forms of scientific e-journals. The transformations stemming from the use of digital technology have had a fundamental impact on the sector of scientific communications [DIL 12]. In the first section, we will give an overview of the state of the art, showing that these new forms of scientific communication are often initially limited to a simple transposition of the paper version. However, new models of transmission have also emerged, notably in terms of open access (free access with the possibility of reusing and redistributing the article(s) in question) and open science, which advocates an open scientific approach with the use of innovative peer review models (open peer review and mega-reviews). Based on these observations and ascertainments, we will go into greater depth in the concept of “hypermediating journals”, presented with regard to the development of the COSSI (Communication, organisation, societe du savoir et information: Community, Organization, Society of Knowledge and Information) journal. Inspired by the idea of a “mediating site” [DAV 04], a hypermediating journal proposes a redocumentarization of its corpus [PED 06, SAL 07] to reveal a new meaning.