Journal of Electronic Publishing

Amy Friedlander is a guest editor for a Special Issue on Communications, Scholarly Communications and the Advanced Research Infrastructure. In "The Triple Helix: Cyberinfrastructure, Scholarly Communication, and Trust," her thesis is that the cyberinfrastructure supports communication, which in its turn both creates and increases the trust that is necessary to the success of the infrastructure.

In <b>Open Access Publishing and the
Emerging Infrastructure for 21st-Century Scholarship</b>, Donald Waters asks,
ìopen access for what and for whom and how can we ensure that there is
sufficient capital for continued innovation in scholarly publishing?

Peter Suber shares his annual review of the open access movement. The article highlights 15 categories of open access activity in 2007.

The growing need for institutions to capture and maintain access to their administrative and academic information is driving the exploration of organizational models for digital preservation. Among the approaches being developed are institutional repositories and e-journal archives.

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

The widespread availability of digital content creates opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from those represented in traditional scholarly literature. To capitalize on these opportunities, digital content must routinely be collected, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly more rigorous than conventional methods. A new form of infrastructure is required to ensure that digital content, including research products and primary sources, is readily available, accessible, and usable.

Charles Henry raises fundamental questions about the nature of the university now that
communication and scholarship are so ingrained in academe.

Although many new forms of scholarly exchange have reached an advanced state of adoption, scholars and researchers generally remain remarkably naïve and uninformed about many issues involved with change in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication broadly. It is increasingly important that dialogue at research institutions involve a much wider group of researchers and scholars. Only active engagement by those undertaking research and scholarship can ensure that the advancement of research and scholarship takes priority in the development and adoption of new models. Research libraries have led in educating stakeholders about new models and are expanding their outreach to campus communities. In considering the effects of recent change, and looking to emerging trends and concerns, six dangers of the current moment are considered along with six topics ripe for campus dialogue.

New cyberinfrastructures require not only collaboration across
disciplines, but collaboration across organizations. In The Virtual
Observatory Meets the Library, G. Sayeed Choudhury tells of the lessons
learned - academic, technological, and sociological - when Johns Hopkins
University created an astronomical database.

As research collaborations grow in size, scope, and time horizon, they increasingly resemble organizations in and of themselves. The traditional institutional structure of science, however, is fundamentally focused on individual scientists. Reconciling these novel research organizations with traditional structures has proven a difficult challenge for the high energy physics community, which has a longstanding tradition of large collaborations. In this paper I draw on interview data gathered in this community to explore the issues of authorship and credit attribution, with an eye toward extrapolating lessons for those in other disciplines. Results suggest that authorship practices in physics are fundamentally problematic in several respects, and that this stems in part from a need to recognize multiple types of contributions.

In April 2007, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) held an invitational workshop on data-driven science and data-driven scholarship, co-chaired by Ronald Larsen and William Arms, who jointly authored the final report. The report used the term cyberscholarship to describe new forms of research that become possible when high-performance computing meets digital libraries. | [1] Elsewhere in this issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, Ronald Larsen describes the workshop and its conclusions. In this article, William Arms gives a personal view of the motivation behind the workshop and the roles of libraries and publishing in achieving its goals.