Share Your Smarts: New Models of Scholarly Communication
Abstract
The traditional system of scholarly communication through journals and monographs has been eroded by rapidly rising costs of academic periodicals, increasing control by commercial publishers, the decline of university presses, and challenges to fair use of copyrighted information. These trends are producing significant losses in access to scholarship. Libraries are cutting journal subscriptions and facing legal action for using reserve readings. At the same time, new models of scholarly communication are emerging, such as open access journals, multimedia projects in digital humanities, preprint repositories, and freely available video lectures. Economic necessity is driving some of this change, but it is also fostered by technological developments and evolving cultural expectations of access to information. This presentation summarizes the Library's investigation of the most promising new strategies for scholars to share their research.