Scholarly communication is an umbrella term used to describe the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community (such as university academics) and beyond.
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Another definition of scholarly communications is the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavors. Among the many scholarly communications issues include author rights, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing including open access, institutional repositories, rights and access to federally funded research, and preservation of intellectual assets.[1]
The most common method of scholarly communication is by writing up the findings of research in to an article to be published in a scholarly journal; however, there are many other methods, such as publishing a book, book chapter, conference paper, and - particularly in the arts and humanities - multimedia formats such as sound and video recordings.
The term 'Scholarly Communications' has been in common usage at least since the mid-1970s, in recent years there has been widespread belief that the traditional system for disseminating scholarship has reached a state of crisis [2] [3] (often referred to as the "publishing crisis" or "serials crisis").
Main areas of the 'crisis':
The proliferation of new journals and the "twigging" of established journals into smaller sub-specialities, combined with rising prices, especially in the sciences, have dramatically reduced the capacity of research libraries to purchase resources required by their scholarly communities. All disciplines and formats are affected, the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences, books as well as journals. The proliferation of electronic journals and the various pricing models for this information has further complicated the acquisitions issue, both for libraries and for publishers.
Many groups, including library consortium, research funders[4], academics and Universities have been calling for changes to the ways scholarly communication takes place, particularly in light of internet creating new and low cost methods to disseminate research, while still maintaining a 'peer review' process to ensure the quality of research is maintained. Developments such as Open Access and Institutional Repositories at Universities are seen vehicles for changing or improving the scholarly communication process.
Chief among the factors contributing to the perceived crisis is the academic reward system, which emphasizes quantity of publication. There is a consequent demand by scholars for peer-reviewed publication outlets. Another important cause is the commercialization and internationalization of scholarly publishing. The growing dominance of publishing conglomerates in scientific, technical, and medical fields, and to some degree in the social sciences, is of special concern to information professionals. It has been shown that these publishers charge prices for scholarly journals that greatly exceed those of scholarly societies and professional associations, university presses, and other not-for-profit publishers. Scholars, often indifferent to rights issues, transfer copyright to for-profit publishers, frequently for reports of research funded wholly or partially at public expense. Commercial publishers have established a highly profitable niche for themselves in the scholarly communication chain.
Scholarly Communication is seen as a crucial part of research, and researchers - many of whom are lecturers and academics at universities - are often judged by their academic output and list of publications. Promotions will normally take in to account the number of publications and how prestigious the journals they were published in (e.g. Nature and The Lancet are seen as very prestigious journals within the sciences). A researcher's publication list will help create them a reputation within their discipline.
A key element of the process is ensuring the research meets a level of quality and is of scholarly merit. This is normally done through a process called peer review, where other researchers in the same discipline review the research write up and decide if it is of sufficient quality. For example in the case of a journal article, the author(s) of a piece of research will submit their article to a journal, it will then be sent to a number of other academics who specialise in the same area to be 'peer reviewed'. The Journal will often receive many more articles than there is space to publish them, and it is in their interest to publish only those of the highest quality (which will over time increase the reputation of the journal). If the reviewers feel the article is of a high enough quality for the journal, they will often request some changes to be made and once these are done, accept the article for publication.