The document discusses opportunities for scholarly communication through information and communication technologies (ICT). It notes that academics want their work to be read, visible, cited, and to make an impact. However, dissemination of knowledge has traditionally been out of academics' control. New trends include electronic dissemination through various models like repositories and journals. Content is increasingly multimedia. Scholars will rely on integrated electronic environments containing a variety of scholarly works. Universities are taking more control over dissemination. Academics are encouraged to develop online presences and exploit opportunities to share knowledge.
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Laura Scholarly Communication Dfid 10 September Final2
1. Scholarly communication ICT-enabled opportunities for academics Scholarly communication ICT-enabled opportunities for academics Laura Czerniewicz 14 September 2009
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3. And academics in developing countries want to be producers of knowledge not simply consumers of knowledge
14. Prototype of new scholarly article http://beta.cell.com/ Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project's goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques. We have developed prototypes for two articles from Cell to demonstrate initial concepts and get feedback from the scientific community.
[A]n important and growing part of African libraries’ work is supporting the development of online publishing facilities for African research. This is an essential role if locally produced research is to be made accessible within and outside of African institutions. http://www.comminit.com/en/node/301463/36
• Data are from the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s on-linestatistics, 2005. • *Territories for which data have been estimated are not shown in the table. • New books and pamphlets are shown, not http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/posters/worldmapper_map343_ver5.pdfwww.worldmapper. Org This map shows the distribution of book and pamphlet titles published, not the number of copies sold. Western Europe dominates this map due to the high number of new books and pamphlets published in 1999. A book is defined as having at least 50 pages, a pamplet has 5 to 49 pages. In 1999 there were a million new book titles worldwide. The most new titles were produced in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. The world rate of new titles is 167 being published per million people per year.
The 2008 study Opening Access to Knowledge in Southern African Universities interrogated: existing constraints to availability of academic and other relevant research publication in the social sciences and humanities, the health sciences and the natural sciences and engineering measure s to increase the availability of academic and other relevant research publications to students and researchers new approaches to knowledge production and dissemination among the research community ie librarians, research managers and prominent researchers/scientists the contribution of open access approaches to scientific collaboration and endeavour limitations, remedies and opportunities Luci Abrahams Mark Burke Eve Gray Andrew Rens Published by SARUA 2008 Eight universities in seven countries were selected to participate in the qualitative study. University of Botswana University of Dar es SalaamUniversity of Malawi University of Mauritius UNISA University of Pretoria University of Zambia
information behaviour of the researcher of the future 11 January 2008 a ciber briefing paper UCL
New forms of content will enable new economic models Traditional economic models of publishing are being disrupted by the Web, and new ones are emerging. Universities must revisit traditional views about how publishing is supported. Creating and disseminating dynamic content imposes some new costs on the system (software tools, storage, bandwidth) and reduces others (printing, physical storage, distribution). The actors in the new system may be different, especially for user-generated content. Information technology provides an opportunity for universities to restructure the scholarly communications system in ways that better reflect the community’s values than the current system. This means having more influence over what gets published and how it is accessed and priced. Publishing increasingly occurs across a continuum, with subscription-based, highly controlled content at one end and free open access content at the other. One administrator described a future with a spectrum from open, contributed content such as self-published, non peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings etc. at one end, and edited, peer-reviewed journals, reference works, monographs, and new types of products enabled by the electronic environment at the other.
Blurring of boundaries between formal and informal publishing Formal scholarly publishing is characterized by a process of selection, editing, printing and distribution of an author’s content by an intermediary (preferably one with some name recognition). Informal scholarly publication, by comparison, describes the dissemination of content (sometimes called “gray literature”) that generally has not passed through these processes, such as working papers, lecture notes, student newsletters, etc. In the past decade, the range and importance of the latter has been dramatically expanded by information technology, as scholars increasingly turn to preprint servers, blogs, listservs, and institutional repositories, to share their work, ideas, data, opinions, and critiques. These forms of informal publication have become pervasive in the university and college1 environment. As scholars increasingly rely on these channels to share and find information, the boundaries between formal and informal publication will blur. These changes in the behavior of scholars will require changes in the approaches universities take to all kinds of publishing. Ithaka P4
Multimedia and multi-format delivery will become increasingly important … ..scholars increasingly wish to incorporate audio and video materials in their research and teaching. In the future, scholarship published online will be enhanced with embedded graphics, audio and video materials, all linked with datasets and applications needed to manipulate data, etc. Imagine, for example, an anthropological study of pre-literate societies with embedded audio clips of oral interviews, or a journal article in film studies that includes video clips, or a work of history that includes audio versions of speeches, or a work of science that includes complex animations. Building the infrastructure to support multimedia content – the storage capacity and connectivity, tools for creating and accessing content, archiving multimedia assets, etc. – requires substantial capital investment. Similarly, a new generation of devices for consuming information will require that content be organized and presented in new ways.
A field team of librarians at ARL institutions in the US and Canada was assembled to interview faculty members on their campuses about the digital scholarly resources they find useful in their work. The field team of 301 librarians at 46 institutions interviewed professors about the digital resources they use. Ithaka staff then evaluated each resource to ensure that it met ARL’s definition of “original and scholarly works,” those resources containing born-digital content by and for a scholarly audience. Of the 358 responses the field team gathered, 206 unique digital resources met these criteria. These resources are included in a publicly-accessible database.1 The final report is based on both the fact-checked results of the field study and interviews This qualitative approach, while not statistically meaningful, yielded a rich cross-section of what innovation in digital scholarly resources looks like today. The final report identifies eight principal types of digital scholarly resources: E-only journals§ Reviews§ Preprints and working papers§ Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and annotated § content Data§ Blogs§ Discussion forums§ Prof§ essional and scholarly hubs
Totally Synthetic An interesting example of a successful research-oriented blog is Totally Synthetic 8. Started by Paul Docherty in early 2006 when still a PhD student, it covers the synthesis of organic compounds through discussion of recently published papers and has become one of the best known and best read blogs in chemistry, with around 32,000 unique readers per month9. Although the number of active commenters is only a small fraction of the total readership, articles receive plenty of comments, with 30-40 comments common and up to 100-150 in some cases. Although it is produced using blog software, Totally Synthetic has close similarities to a virtual journal (selection and highlighting of interesting papers), to a recommendation service like Faculty of 1000 and to post-publication commentary/peer review (e.g. if journals used the same track-back functionality used by blogging software, blogs comments such as on Totally Synthetic could be automatically linked to from the article.) Mark Ware
One issue that may prevent academics from contributing to wikis is the lack of attribution for their work, which is important both in terms of moral rights but also for career and professional advancement. And of course from the user’s perspective, authorship attribution is important to assess the origin, authority and reliability of information. An interesting attempt to address this is WikiGenes 15. This uses newly developed wiki software that allows users to easily identify the author of every word and also allows users to rate other users. WikiGenes also provides editing tools that provide authors with integrated database and ontologies look-up, which both simplifies the authoring process and improves the quality of the result (by facilitating consistency). Mark Ware
OpenWetWare (http://openwetware.org/) is now something of a venerable example of community use of a wiki in science. This is aimed at scientists working in biology and biological engineering and focuses on providing a database of protocols and materials for life science laboratory work, plus the facility for research groups and labs to maintain home pages on the site. The OWW statistics show about 11,000 pages. There are 5500 registered users. Use of this site is substantial, with traffic of around 1.5 million pageviews or 275,000 sessions per month. Mark Ware
Looking to the future, scholars will increasingly seek to work in electronic research and publishing environments. These environments will provide them with the tools and resources for conducting research, collaborating with peers, sharing working papers, publishing conference proceedings, manipulating data sets, etc.
While some disciplines seem to lend themselves § to certain formats of digital resource more than others, examples of innovative resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/technical/medical subject areas. Traditions of scholarly culture relating to establishing scholarly legitimacy through credentialing, peer review, and citation metrics exert a powerful force on these innovative online projects. Almost every resource suggested by the interviewed scholars incorporates peer review or editorial oversight. Though some born-digital journals are beginning to experiment with open peer review, the examples we observed were still in early stages. Many digital publications are directed at small, niche audiences. There appears to be a very long tail in the field of digital scholarly resources with many tightly-focused publications directed at narrow audiences and capable of running on relatively small budgets. may need years to establish their place in their scholarly community. Innovations relating to multimedia content and § Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types. We observed “video articles,” peer-reviewed reader commentary, and medieval illuminated texts coded as data – all evidence of the creative format mash-ups that challenge us to re-think the definitions of traditional content categories. Projects of all sizes are still seeking paths to § sustainability. For open access sites – the vast majority of the resources studied here – the challenges can be great, since subscription fees are not an option. Nearly all of the publications that emerged in our survey are experimenting to find economic models that will support their work. . Born-digital journals, blogs, wikis, and other forms of online publishing and discussion now appear in every discipline. While some of these digital resources resemble their print predecessors, others are quite novel, making use of the space, speed, and interactivity that the Internet allows. Though many digital scholarly resources are small in scale, this does not necessarily make them marginal; some have already gained widespread acceptance in their fields on par with the print publications that, until just a decade ago, held an unchallenged monopoly on disseminating scholarly work.
Broadening the exchange of knowledge Garry Risenberg Mail and Guardian 2008
Brown, L., Griffiths, R. and Roscoff, M., 2007 . University Publishing In A Digital Age, New York: Ithaka . http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/Ithaka%20University%20Publishing%20Report.pdf JISC/NSF Report on the Future of Scholarly Communications Arms, W.Y. and Larsen, R.R., 2007. The Future of Scholarly Communications: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship , National Science Foundation; Joint Information Systems Committee. http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/SIS-NSFReport2.pdf . Accessed September 2008 Bell, R.K., Hill, D. and Lehming, R.F., 2007. The Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities, Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srs07204/start.cfm Accessed 26 July 2008 Gevers W and Mati X (eds) /(2006) Report on a strategic approach to research publishing in South Africa . Pretoria: Academy of Science of South Africa. http://www.assaf.org.za/strat_report.html (accessed 31 August 2008). Grey, E; Hodgkinson-Willimas C &Wilmers, M (2009) Opening Scholarship, Centre for Educational Technology, UCT Government of Australia, Productivity Commission Report (2007)Public Support for Science and Innovation, Canberra http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/science/docs/finalreport (accessed November 2008)
Brown, L., Griffiths, R. and Roscoff, M., 2007 . University Publishing In A Digital Age, New York: Ithaka . http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/Ithaka%20University%20Publishing%20Report.pdf JISC/NSF Report on the Future of Scholarly Communications Arms, W.Y. and Larsen, R.R., 2007. The Future of Scholarly Communications: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship , National Science Foundation; Joint Information Systems Committee. http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/SIS-NSFReport2.pdf . Accessed September 2008 Bell, R.K., Hill, D. and Lehming, R.F., 2007. The Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities, Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srs07204/start.cfm Accessed 26 July 2008 Gevers W and Mati X (eds) /(2006) Report on a strategic approach to research publishing in South Africa . Pretoria: Academy of Science of South Africa. http://www.assaf.org.za/strat_report.html (accessed 31 August 2008). Grey, E; Hodgkinson-Willimas C &Wilmers, M (2009) Opening Scholarship, Centre for Educational Technology, UCT Government of Australia, Productivity Commission Report (2007)Public Support for Science and Innovation, Canberra http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/science/docs/finalreport (accessed November 2008) interrogated: