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Scholarly Communication: An Overview

Scholarly communication is considered by many academics and librarians around the world to be in a state of crisis. Rising journal prices, the increasing difficulty that faculty in some disciplines are having getting articles accepted for publication, and the growing lag times between article submission and acceptance and publication are causing many people to look around for other options. Click here for more background information.

The scholarly journal publication process has for many years provided a specific structure for registration, certification, awareness, and archiving of scholarly information. This structure, however, has become extremely expensive and less viable for universities as more publishers become high profit-margin monopolies. To achieve the restructuring of scholarly communication requires a variety of complementary and alternative approaches. Scholars and librarians have collaborated together in the last decade to develop alternative scholarly publishing initiatives. These efforts have resulted in projects that:

• increase the competitiveness of scholarly association publications
• produce new, less expensive journals
• support scholar-led initiatives
• create institutional repositories

The institutional repository effort has the potential to make a substantial difference in scholarly communication by making available a much broader spectrum of scholarly communication, including works in progress, conference proceedings, and teaching materials. The institutional repository movement is based on the highly successful electronic preprint archives in the sciences, and the grassroots faculty practice of posting research on the web. It also is consistent with the principle that the scholarly work produced by faculty should be part of the institution's intellectual memory. The university, through the Library, should not be obliged to spend large sums of money to "buy back" information created by the university community. The institutional repository enables the university to provide a set of essential services to its community members for efficient management and dissemination of scholarly digital materials.

These services include:

• registering the research
• communicating the research to discipline peers and international scholars
• preserving the research information for the future
• creating a knowledge bank of the institution's intellectual life

Peer review is not necessarily connected with the institutional repository model; the emergence of viable open access discipline journals will most likely serve that need.

Institutional repositories provide an added value to the university by organizing its digital research and teaching publications in a cost-effective, long-term, searchable archive. In addition to archiving traditional publications, it can effectively serve as a mechanism for other rich scholarly communications that have been historically excluded from the scholarly record: conferences, theses, terminal projects, graduate student research, and the ephemeral gray literature. The goal of institutional repositories will be ultimately to form an international network of indexed repositories searchable from a single interface.

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