Working Session on Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication

Convened by

Charles Henry, President, Council on Library and Information Resources

Scholarly communication is turning inexorably into a digital enterprise. The transition from traditional print to electronic media is currently in a crisis stage, with printed journals and monographs giving way (expensively) to not-quite-defined new forms of academic discourse. While no one doubts that scholarly argument will someday be entirely digital, few agree on how digital discourse will be published, distributed, stored, shared, and made economically sustainable. Everyone from libraries and publishers to faculty authors and consumers are struggling to adapt to a future everyone knows is coming but which no one can define.

This working session on scholarly communications will focus on problems and possible solutions related to publication and delivery of digital scholarly argument, and the implications for libraries of a future in which all new academic materials are born digital and traditional materials are digitized. Particular focus will be directed at the challenges and opportunities particular to small liberal arts institutions. In this regard, we will be discussing NITLE’s new Anvil project, which is exploring new forms of digital scholarly argument, developing and testing new platforms and models for academic publishing. Liberal arts colleges and universities, and particularly their libraries, have an unprecedented opportunity to gain control not only over practices and costs of acquisition, distribution, and maintenance of scholarly material, but also over its actual production. The business of producing and publishing scholarly research for use by the wider academic community has until now been monopolized by large research institutions and for-profit publishers, but the advent of digital publishing and production technology has driven down costs to the point where smaller liberal arts institutions can participate in the scholarly communications enterprise as something other than helpless consumers.

Key Questions

• What are likely scenarios for the purchase, distribution, consumption, and ownership of digital scholarly publications?
• How can libraries manage—or at least influence—this process so as to develop reasonable cost models?
• How will new forms of scholarly argument factor into promotion and tenure?
• What kinds of platforms will emerge as dominant?
• Will new publishers emerge, or will traditional publishers reinvent themselves in time to control the new digital marketplace for scholarly material? How can libraries help control or shape this process?
• How can libraries curate, distribute, share, catalog, and otherwise manage digital material?
• What is the role of the library in an exclusively digital world?
• What happens to print collections?
• How can libraries in the NITLE Network share collections so as to lower costs of storage and maintenance of print materials?
• What cost models promise to be most workable in a digital world?
• Is digital transformation a threat to or opportunity for small liberal arts institutions?

About the Session Convener

Charles Henry is the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). He is the former Provost and University Librarian at Rice University, where he also served as founder/publisher of Rice University Press, the nation’s first all-digital university press. He is currently a board member of NITLE and of the Center for Research Libraries, and a member of the Scientific Board of the Open Access Publishing in the European Network (OAPEN) project. He has written dozens of publications and received numerous grants and awards, including from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust.