Theme 4: Authorship and Scholarly Publishing
From Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication
Notions of authorship and what it means to “publish” the products of research and scholarship are rapidly evolving. Authors and publishers are leveraging new technologies such as interactive multimedia and online-only scholarly resources, but primarily for “in-progress” communication rather than “final, archival publication.”[1] Scholarly products are taking many new forms - databases and data sets; digital text and images; simulations, visualizations, and animations; curated online reference works; and specialized software – the stuff of digital scholarship. Blogs, wikis, and other new media are advancing scholarly discourse outside of comfortable definitions of “scholarly publishing.”
When faculty employ and create new forms and techniques, evaluating their work against traditional measures is a particular challenge. Although studies document the conservatism and constraining influence of scholarly promotion and tenure review processes and reward systems, we do not yet have deep insight into how they can evolve to recognize and embrace new forms of scholarship. The problem is acute for the creators of digital scholarship, which rarely enters the formal publishing stream, yet is a creative, scholarly act that can influence and underpin both present and future research. But authorship of these programs is not yet rewarded as a form of scholarly communication of the first order in most disciplines.
New business models to evaluate and publish scholarly products are being developed, but their long-term sustainability and impacts are unknown. Driven in part by longstanding resource constraints, the academy needs to have deeper understanding about the effect of commercial publishers’ profit goals on access to and impact of scholarship. Similarly, we need salient data about alternatives to traditional publication and their potential for lower production costs. This data will allow universities to make investment decisions in a range of open access business models offered by commercial and non-profit publishers. Further, we need evidence on whether and how the focus on traditional publication for promotion and tenure can undermine broader distribution of research and the development of alternatives to high-priced publications. What data is most important to collect and how is it to be evaluated and shared? What influences scholars at different points in their careers and what questions should be asked to elicit meaningful responses about changes in authorship? How should librarians work with administrators, individual scholars, and scholarly societies to advance scholarship in new, meaningful and sustainable ways? What new services are required in this new environment and how should they be constituted?
Illustrative Challenges
We need to better understand and support new authoring formats and techniques. Perhaps templates and standards would facilitate the creation of scholarly work while also supporting its preservation; however, it is likely that scholars would resist placing constraints on their creative process. Current electronic journal systems such as DPubS[1] and Open Journals Systems[1] may be extended and replicated to support genres other than “journals”. Similarly, institutional repositories may have the potential for evolving into platforms for more sophisticated means to manage and disseminate digital scholarship.
We need to better understand the full necessary costs of access controlled models of publication as compared to a truly equivalent open access model to reveal where costs savings are possible and under what conditions. This could provide insights into which functions would be unnecessary in an open access model, and which would need to be included. For instance, what costs are saved by removing access/authorization controls? With the advent of new search and discovery tools, is equivalent marketing needed for both? This research could also suggest ideas to address the hypothesized free rider problem, in which users of openly available scholarship do not help cover the costs of its dissemination.
While we know that disciplinary repositories, open-access peer-reviewed journals, and community-supported reference sources can find content and audiences, we do not yet know, for example, how to distribute the cost of supporting projects like the Physics ArXiv across the many institutions reliant on its success. An understanding is required of the conditions under which an endowment model for publications, such as the one in place for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,[1] can work and be cost effective over a long period. We would profit from exploring the relationship between author or “green” archiving of scholarly articles and the formal publications in which they also appear.
If research reveals that formal publications are of decreasing value or changing significance to scholars, what are the implications for research libraries? For example, what are the economics and funding models of the transition? Should librarians shift funding from journal subscriptions to systems that collect and disseminate new forms of content, and when?
Research Possibilities
- Investigate the leadership and management support needed to explore alternatives to the prevalent subscription model including a variety of open access publication models.
- Engage economists to collaborate on research into these issues.
- Document instances of successful shifts and new models to create a diverse collection of compelling examples that can be applied in new arenas.
- Create sophisticated modeling and simulation of current costs projected into the future to test the hypotheses regarding the sustainability of the present system.
- Explore models that effectively shift funding from collecting published works to supporting new forms of content and its dissemination.
- Study the costs of the entire publishing and distribution system for traditional, open access and hybrid models of journal publication. Explorations should include but not be limited to studying the costs of peer review.
- Examine the feasibility, and necessary characteristics of a trusted registry of new business models and experiments concentrating on collaboratively developed, non-profit information products and resources.
- Research and develop authoring tools, publishing templates and open source software packages for scholarly discourse, teaching and publishing. Examine the feasibility and characteristics of registries of such tools.
- Methods to identify, track and create metadata to document and promote publication of and access to large datasets.
NEXT: Theme 5: Value and Value Metrics of Scholarly Communications
