Scholarly communication 1971 to 2013. A Brindley snapshot.

Abstract

This chapter attempts a snapshot of the dramatic changes impacting on scholarly information access and delivery in the last forty years through the prism of Lynne Brindley’s career. This was a period in which historical practices of information and access delivery have been dramatically overturned. In some respects, however, the models of scholarly publishing practice and economics have not changed significantly, arguably because of the dominance of multinational publishers in scholarly publishing, exemplified in the ‘Big Deals’ with libraries and consortia, and the scholarly conservatism imposed to date by research evaluation exercises and tenure and promotion practices.

The recent global debates on open access to publicly funded knowledge, have, however, brought scholarly communication to the forefront of attention of governments and university administrations .The potential exists for scholarly research to be more widely available within new digital economic models, but only if the academic community regains ownership of the knowledge its creates. Librarians can and should play a leading role in shaping ‘knowledge creation, knowledge ordering and dissemination, and knowledge interaction’.