Scholarly Communication

Ithaka's 2006 survey of faculty members sought to determine their attitudes related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects.  This study affords the opportunity to develop trend analysis of many measurements collected in the 2003 and 2000 faculty surveys. As in the past, Ithaka developed a robust set of disciplinary and other demographic analyses that have allowed them to learn more about how best to serve the needs of different types of faculty members. Findings include;

Ithaka's research group studies how new technologies are affecting higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes in four discrete program areas: providing academia with the policy basis needed to transition effectively and responsibly away from print collections and toward increasingly electronic-only collections; helping information-services organizations meet the needs of scholars by understanding their changing attitudes and practices; improving the community's understanding of how new information resources drive teaching and learning practices; and analyzing strategies for the most effective possible dissemination of knowledge from colleges and universities to researchers, students, and other learners. This presentation will review these areas of work and highlight some key findings, encouraging discussion about these and other key strategic issues facing higher education.

This is an essay that was part of the 2007 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation annual report. This piece focuses on scholarly publishing initiatives that the Foundation funded: "one aimed at increasing the capacity of university presses to publish first books by junior scholars in fields where publication opportunities have become constrained, the other at strengthening the substantive relationship between university presses and their home institutions."

The Gutenberg-e project was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs would alter the way historical scholarship is presented, whether scholars would receive the same professional credit for these publications as they would from work published in print, and whether the project would enable the publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The project has a history that includes both exciting breakthroughs and significant challenges. A number of the authors have created completely new models of collaboration in the scholarly communication process as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. We have come to understand that e-books require a significant level of investment in both editorial and technical staff time in order to create publications that reach their full potential as works of digital scholarship. We have also learned that integrating and sustaining this work within a collaborative publishing, library, and technology organization presents significant challenges and great opportunities.

A study of publishing services offered by ARL member libraries that provides valuable context for librarians and campus leaders considering the opportunities offered by this rapidly emerging research library role.

The author argues that there is a critical need for "long-term management and preservation of the digital information, together with mechanisms and policies that encourage people to discover and use it, check references, replicate experiments, and build on each other’s results—whether or not the actual products look like the contemporary journal article."

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward?

The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.