Theme 2: Changing Organizational Models
From Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication
Existing organizational models in the academy are collapsing or reforming in response to shifting values and behavioral changes, technological innovations, and new expectations. For example, more undergraduates are involved in research and listed as co-authors on published papers; interdisciplinary studies are proliferating, even between humanistic and scientific arenas; collaborations across institutions and fields are taking hold as normal practice; and libraries are taking on the role of publisher. These changes create enormous pressure to collapse existing structures and reform into new, often ad hoc groups within and between organizations. Organizational models are under stress not only across disciplines, but also across scholarly societies, academic departments and divisions, and other structures.
Informal modes of communication are proliferating with these changes, while formal modes are slow to adapt. Scholarly communication systems must evolve along with practice. Libraries need to seek out new methods and means of supporting scholars in this changing environment, including collaborative approaches to funding, new service definitions, and facilitation of emerging models.
Illustrative Challenges
Virtual organizations cross institutional boundaries and exist only electronically. They are typically created to accomplish a specific research agenda and are often disbanded when their tasks are complete.[1] The challenge of supporting scholarly communication for virtual organizations is compounded when they comprise distributed user communities across multiple institutions. Knowledge is created and shared among participants, but there is often no explicit, permanent authority to disseminate, document and archive the virtual organization’s output.
Similar issues arise regularly with the growth of interdisciplinary research and teaching agendas. New organizational structures arise at the intersections and subfields of interesting new learning and research agendas. Libraries may not recognize their importance and miss the opportunity to retool their services to assist the work that these centers generate. International collaborations pose more of these challenges. Institutions are extending their reach to a global constituency, to new international partnerships, and are encouraging ad hoc relationships based on individual research programs. These developments must be tracked and their growth aligned with the technical and organizational capacity to record and disseminate their scholarly output.
At the same time new economic realities may limit support for niche areas of inquiry or their new methods of scholarly communication when costs don’t scale for broader applications.
Research Possibilities
- Document the rate of growth of virtual organizations and clarify definitions and characterization. One approach would be to examine the portfolios of grant makers that are funding Virtual Organizations to identify the number that are being funded to generate an overview that can be used for extrapolation.
- Apply research on oral traditions to the development of virtual communities. This could provide useful insights into how they develop ways of sharing and preserving informal information.
- Conduct cost-benefit analyses for several institutions to determine the investment required to create and maintain a virtual organization dissemination or “publication” service.
- Perform economic modeling and simulation to explore questions about scaling the distribution of support across new and traditional research centers and new and traditional communication modes.
NEXT: Theme 3: How Scholars Work
