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US flag Scholarly communication

The world of scholarly publishing is in revolution. There are now many more opportunities for providing wider access to research results such as institutional repositories, open access archiving and publishing, university presses collaborating with libraries on digital publishing projects, as well as blogs and wikis on every subject. There are new business models evolving to support all these new opportunities. But if you talk to academics, you're more than likely to find its business as usual. Look at the quarterly financial statements of the publishers of scientific, medical and technical journals, and it's business much better than usual.

So what's all this scholarly communication fuss about?

Change in academia is slow. Still, things are really changing.

In September, 1997, ARL and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) sponsored a symposium on The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis. We no longer talk about a crisis, but the problems described by symposium participants have not been addressed. They have grown.

In November, 1997, ARL, AAU and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable sponsored a discussion among leaders of higher education focusing on concrete steps the university community could take to regain control over scholarly communication. A summary of the group's conclusions, "To Publish and Perish," is contained in the March 1998 issue of Policy Perspectives.  This article contains many references to earlier works on this subject.

Since then, a string of studies have continued to document the decline of the scholarly monograph. In summer 2007, Ithaka published its report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, and soon after, the Institute for the Future of the Book made the report available for comment through its platform, CommentPress. Also ScienceCommons, MediaCommons, Public Library of Science, PubMed Central, SciVee and nanoHub. See, things are happening.

To help us see what's going on, there's the DOAJ, the Directory of open access journals. And Sherpa's RoMeo database that helps us to determine publishers' open access policies. The fall issue of ARL's bulletin (2007) was devoted to the subject of university publishing and included very concise, well-written and very readable commentary from a variety of angles. If you don't know about these issues, do check out a few resources. You could use Google scholar to search for the most recent writing on the subject. Find out what's going on in your neighborhood and get involved.