Scholarly Communication Issues

Future of Scholarly Communication: Digital tipping point

This article seems to open up the topic of innovative publishing (mainly scholarly publishing) further. The project focuses on a model which will explore the open access scholarly publishing while maintaining the standards. The project suggests that the reading behavior and preferences vary among different scholarly community and further proposes to reduce the communication gap. The project addresses the future of the scholarly communication.

The author discusses six main points that he thinks are considered important for the future of the scholarly communication.

~Digital collaborations among the university presses have resulted in "locating, recruiting, assessing, and editing the scholarly resources."
This not only has resulted in collaborations within the country but around the world.
~The Open access has bypassed the more traditional forms of communication. This may bring out the digital scholarly communication.
Example I find is that the scholars in India who had to use the British Library or American Embassy library for scholarly articles are now able to access materials through their universities.
~The rise in digital publication and decline in the print models will create a paradigm shift in the scholarly communication. This is the trend in the scholarly communication within and outside the academic community.
~Each university will reevaluate their distribution and design of the publishing community.
~University presses must continue to play their customary role of locating authors and texts. This may be an important aspect in maintaining authority.
~"Networked book to become the gold standard for the scholarly publishing of the future" (Institute for the Future of the Book, IFB). Can network books concept replace books? A blog-like feature to replace books? What happens to authority? What happens to the scholarly communication? Will the scholarly community accept and incorporate the comments from scholars and other readers?

~Anu

Accessed Sep 5,08 http://www.futureofthebook.org/