Special Area of Interest

The transformation of scholarly communication systems and processes is a topic of increasing urgency in academia today.  Many tensions within the research community derive from this need for transformation, its challenges, and its opportunities.  I define scholarly communication systems in a broad sense, to include all of the technical means, economic interactions and cultural phenomena by which knowledge is exchanged in scholarly circles.  This definition encompasses a wide variety  of phenomena, from scholarly print publications to information retrieved and disseminated via global hypertext networks.

The transformation of scholarly communication systems has been driven through history by the interaction of technological and cultural innovations.  The printing press was a key technological breakthrough in the history of scholarly discourse.  This technology was refined over the years through such cultural innovations as the development of the modern university structure, publication of monographs, journals, proceedings, and other conventions of format.  Subsequent breakthroughs in information technology such as film, phonographs, and computers have each contributed to further revolutions in scholarly communication systems which build and interact in rich and complex ways.

A strong perception has arisen that we now face a crisis in scholarly communication.  This crisis is a result of many cultural, economic, and technological factors.  Escalating costs of scholarly information have resulted in enormous fiscal difficulties for universities and libraries. The practice of promotion and tenure has resulted in a proliferation of scholarly literature dominated by prestigious academic publishing firms who can command inordinately high prices for their products.  At the same time university and library budgets are in most cases static or shrinking.  The development of intellectual property rights has not kept pace with technological changes and trends in the academic publishing industry, and poses vexing dilemmas for the scholarly community.  A confusion of emerging technologies offer expensive potential solutions.

There is great need for theoretical analysis that can lead to resolutions of the tensions in current scholarly communication systems and guide decision making.  Such an analysis would contribute to and build on the dialogue among the many significant groups of stakeholders now concerned with these issues (examples include the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Association of American Publishers,  the Mellon Foundation, and others).  This conceptual framework would include a categorization of the successful and unsuccessful patterns in adapting new technologies and cultural approaches to communication in scholarship.  It would provide insight into how we can most effectively make use of the opportunities presented by changing information technology in the scholarly communication process, and how to understand the cultural effects such changes will have on us.