The changing nature of scholarly communication

Abstract

This presentation is an attempt to frame the discussion about open access in terms of the bigger scholarly communication landscape. This works with the premise that there is no one-size-fits-all mode of scholarly communication due to disciplinary differences. Scholarly communities can be conceptualised as ‘invisible colleges’, and where a particular discipline sits on the spectrum of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ research dramatically influences how people communicate within their research fields.

The primary unit of scholarly communication - the scholarly article - has not changed much since the first journals nearly 350 years ago. But the ownership of these journals has concentrated into a small number of publishers and in parallel, the cost of subscriptions has skyrocketed. This has been dubbed the ‘serials crisis’, which has partly emerged because the role of the librarian as the conduit between the sellers and consumers of scholarly information means regular market pressures do not apply. In economic terms, this is described as a failed market.

In response, the open access movement has argued that research results should be freely available. Open access can primarily be achieved in two ways. The gold model of open access journals - such as those published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) – is a different business model for publishers, charging article processing fees rather than subscriptions. The second, green model makes versions of research articles available in a repository run by an institution, or by a discipline. For example, the physics community, which is an ‘urban’ field of research, celebrates the coming of age (21 years) of their repository, arXiv.org in 2012.

The open access movement is forcing changes in the scholarly communication landscape. New journal types are emerging. PLoS One which is a multidisciplinary scientific and medical journal, offering fast turnaround and peer review only to ensure work is technically sound, became the largest journal in the world in 2010, publishing 7,000 articles[2]. Many other publishers have recently released their own versions of this type of ‘mega-journal’. Other open access journals, such as RNA Biology[3] require authors to provide a wiki article that is understandable by an undergraduate for peer review with the scientific article.

The changing nature of communication technology is also broadening the tools available for measurement of citation and impact of articles. Indeed the idea of a ‘scholarly article’ itself is being challenged in some disciplines. Certainly the necessity to restrict publication to issues and volumes is becoming redundant. But many areas are still unresolved, particularly in relation to citation. One problem is citing articles that are digital only, and therefore do not have any page numbers, another is that of versioning when published documents are effectively ‘live’. Scholarly communication is a rapidly evolving and active area. Show more