The Future of Scholarly Communication: Implications of New Technology on the Tradition Publishing System.
Speaking Notes: Kathleen Shearer, Research Associate, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (May 31, 2003)
Well, first of all, I don't think I'm going to talk about "Open Access" today, because I think that most of the audience is aware of the basic concept of open access and related activities, such as open access journals.
Rather, I'd like to talk about what I see as a much bigger trend in scholarly communication that I believe will have important implications for all members of the scholarly communication environment, including publishers, libraries, researchers and indeed the nature of research dissemination itself.
I am fairly new to this field, so what I'd really like to do is just raise some issues, and perhaps speculate at some implications, and leave some time at the end for discussion, because I certainly have more questions than answers.
I think the discussion about electronic publishing versus print publishing is an important one, however, there is an even broader issues about the future of scholarly communication that has arisen as a result new technology...that has not been raised today.
And that is, the ultimate long-term viability of the "peer-reviewed journal" as the major means for disseminating scholarly research.
Scholarly communication really refers to both formal communication, or what we usually refer to as publishing, which most often takes the form of journal articles and monographs, and informal communication, that is the informal discourse that occurs amongst scholars.
As it has been for many years
Peer-reviewed scholarly publications really make up our official, public "record of research knowledge and scholarly output", as Aldyth Holmes pointed out earlier.
While, informal scholarly discourse was for the most part unrecorded and occurred behind closed doors.
However, because of new technology, what we are finding is that, that previously "private" scholarly discourse is occurring in public venues over the Internet.
For example, we can now find an incredible wealth of scholarly dialogue in many disciplines through discussion lists and list serves.
Similarly, faculty members are posting all kinds of content on their personal and departmental websites.
Another example are e-prints servers, mainly used in the sciences by researchers to exchange pre-prints with each other.
In other disciplines, were seeing a growth in what we call "virtual academic communities"
So because of the Internet, this type of dialogue is now becoming part of the public record of scholarly knowledge and output.
And this material does not fit into the box of the standard, traditional, scholarly publication.
Now, the first question I have is what is the value of this type of material, what we librarians call "gray literature"?
I think for researchers, it has tremendous value, and in some disciplines, such as physics, they really rely on it tremendously, and I think it's value will grow, as researchers become more comfortable with new technology.
I know myself, I wrote a book the field of information science this year, and most of my bibliography cites sources that are both electronic and not the standard peer-reviewed literature
I don't know if I agree with Frits, who said earlier, that Institutional repositories are "publishing" initiatives by libraries, but rather I believe they are a recognition by libraries that this material "outside of the box" is important for their constituent populations, and it should be collected and preserved.
For those of you who don't know what institutional repositories are, they are a fairly new model for collecting and storing the digital research output of a university,
The idea is that authors self-deposit their scholarly material into a central university repository, and then this material becomes available free of charge to anyone over the Internet.
So, institutional repositories are just one possible way of preserving the wider range of scholarly material than what has traditionally being recorded by the publishing system
The real value to broader society of this trend, is that more scholarly discourse is freely available to all over the Internet, and this is particularly so for researchers in developing countries-but the fact is, that it is only free, because it sits outside of the traditional publishing system. As Aldythe said, traditional publishing has significant costs associated with it, mainly in the area of editing and peer review, and these costs do not go away, with electronic publishing.
The second question I have is what will be the impact of this on the traditional publishing system?
Certainly the value added services, such as peer-review, editing, and citation linking, provided by journals are very important and appreciated by researchers.
So perhaps, the growth of this informal type of literature will not have a tremendous effect on the traditional publishing system.
As well, the fact that peer-reviewed "high impact" literature continues to play such an important role in awarding grants, and promotion and tenure activities means that academic researchers will continue to submit their articles to prestigious journal publishers.
On the other hand, if costs become so much of an issue for libraries, that they are really unable to provide their researchers with the material they need, the trend towards greater dialogue and exchange outside the publishing system may continue to grow.
So these are the questions that I pose to you today, and I hope that some of you will have some thoughtful insights into this.
Thank you very much.
