Transcript Scholarly communication and electronic resources: a

Scholarly communication
and electronic resources:
two views
Berenika M. Webster
Centre for Information Behaviour and
Evaluation of Research, University College
London
Keith Webster
University Librarian and Director
of Learning Services, University of
Queensland

Scholarly communication
• Process
• Actors


How is behaviour of scholars
changing?
How can libraries respond?
My work – Berenika (academic)

Sources of information:
• Discussion list, blogs, RSS feeds





Bibliographic info of new publications
Full text (from inst rep. author’s webpage, etc.)
Follow discussion
Pose questions
Announcements of conferences; calls for papers; funding
opportunities; jobs
• E-mail
• A&I services for searching (Web of Science, LISA,
Medline)
• Full text services for browsing (Science Direct; Ingenta)
• Google search, then request of off-print from author
My work – Berenika (academic)

Communicating research
• Peer-reviewed journal
• Conferences
• Professional literature
• Book chapters
• Self-archiving (of post-prints)
• Open publishing (reports and data sets)
• Wikis for collaborative research
• VoIP and videoconferencing
My work – Keith (librarian)
• Select
• Acquire
• Store
• Retrieve
• Provide access
• Preserve and dispose

Of information to support research
and learning & teaching
My work – Keith (librarian)

Manage infrastructure
•
•
•
•

Staff
Budget
Space
Technology
Manage infrastructure at UQ
• 250+ staff (38,000 students, 6,000
academics)
• AU$35 million Budget
• 13 libraries, 2 million books, tens of thousands
of journals
• Lots of computers, repositories, systems
Scholarly communication
… technological and institutional means by which
theories, interpretations, and findings are
submitted to the scrutiny of expert disciplinary
communities and then critiqued, endorsed,
disseminated, synthesized and archived on behalf
of broad community of teachers and learners
(Fyffe, 2001)
Informal – social/professional networks
Formal – publishing and making available
Structure





Changes in scholarship
Research funding
E-research
Scholarly communication crisis
New forms of scholarly
communication and the academic
response
Players in the formal process

Funders
•
•

Scholars
•
•
•

do research
write articles and
provide quality assurance through peer review,
Publishers and learned societies
•
•
•
•
•
•

establish research priorities
provide resources,
accumulate
copy-edit
provide quality assurance through peer review
produce
market
distribute,
Academic libraries
•
•
•
buy
archive and
provide access.
Drivers of change

Shift in knowledge production mode

Funding structures and requirements

ICT

Crisis in scholarly publishing system
Mode 2 in knowledge production

Context (diverse teams focusing on use)

Discipline base flow (interdisciplinary and
problem-based)

Social organisation (collaborative across sectors;
transitory)

Accountability (social and economic)

Quality control (academic merit, cost
effectiveness, economic and social relevance)
(Gibbons [et al], 1994)

Collaboration
• enabled by ICT
• requirement of funders
• changing nature of research
(instrumentation; professionalisation;
multidisciplinarity; specialisms)

Interdisciplinarity
• use driven and problem-based
Funding structures and
requirements 1


External funding
Diverse source of funding
• Government
• Not-for-profit
• Industry

Economic outcomes
• increase wealth creation & prosperity
• improve nation’s health, environment & quality of life




Innovation
Improved competitiveness
“Commercialisation” of research
Less “curiosity-driven” activity
Funding structures and
requirements 2

Evaluation, evaluation, evaluation…
• intellectual merit
• cost-effectiveness or “value for money”
• economic and social relevance

Requirements of research assessment
• increased quantity of published outputs
• increased “quality” of outputs

Compliance requirements
• published outputs in open access
• storage and re-use of data sets
Percentages of UK biomedical papers
acknowledging support from five main
sectors, 1989-2000
45
40
1989-92
1993-96
1997-00
% of all UK ROD papers
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
No funding ack.
UK Govt
UK PNP
Industry
Foreign
International
Numbers of UK biomedical papers and
authors per paper, 1989-2000
35000
30000
5+
Papers per year
25000
4
20000
3
15000
10000
2
5000
1
0
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
Percentage of UK biomedical papers coauthored internationally, 1989-2000
36
32
% of all UK papers
28
24
Other add
Australia add
with US add
with EU add
20
16
12
8
4
0
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
ICT (1)


Democratisation of informal networks
“De-formalisation” of formal
networks
• open publishing and self-archiving
• open peer review
• blogs and discussion boards
ICT (2)
Cyberinfrastructure to support e -science
Atkins, 2004
ICT (3)

Decrease in the use of physical libraries

Access to wider range of materials
• depth (backfiles)
• breadth (interdisciplinary databases; aggregator
services)
• digital access to primary resources
• federated searching across various formats and
institutional collections (libraries/archives/museums)
• new ways of knowledge discovery (data mining) and
hyperlinking


Citation studies: low uptake of web-only
materials.
Questionnaires and interviews: web-only
materials are important.
Crisis in scholarly publishing
system (1)

Numbers of titles are soaring
• publish or perish
• research assessment

Death of scholarly monograph?
• new breed of journals
• e-publishing only
• universities/funders subsidise costs


Inflation rates for books and journal are
soaring
Libraries cannot keep up
Decrease in purchasing power (1)
120
100
80
60
40
20
19
80
19
83
19
86
19
89
19
92
19
95
19
98
20
01
20
04
20
07
20
10
0
Buying power
Decrease in purchasing power (2)
120
100
80
60
40
20
19
80
19
83
19
86
19
89
19
92
19
95
19
98
20
01
20
04
20
07
20
10
0
Buying power
Function of
avail info
Crisis in scholarly publishing
system (2)

Scholars have lost control of the formal
communication system
• learned societies sell off titles
• peer review process secretive and biased;
unable to detect fraud

Commercial publishers have taken over
• scholarly information as commodity
• scholars freely giving away their research
outputs; libraries buying it from publishers;
funders pay twice
Crisis in scholarly publishing
system (3)
Problems with publishing in a
traditional model
• space constrains and high rejection
rates in premium journals
• slow to produce
• fewer monographs published
• no money to pay page changes
• No appropriate outlet for
multidisciplinary research
Crisis in scholarly publishing
system (4)

Electronic publications
• Faster turn-around of submission/revision/publication

Models
• As a supplement to traditional print journal (with full content
or part content in e-format); subscription based (majority of
commercial publications)
• Electronic only publication; subscription based
• Open access



Digital versions of print journals “free to air” (e.g. BMJ)
Open access e-only journals (PubMedCentral)
Who pays?
• Self-archiving




institutional or subject repositories
pre-print archives
poor knowledge of copyright
slow uptake by researchers
Disciplinary differences
Science, technology and medicine
•Rapidly changing user needs
•Digital everything – especially
big data sets
•Electronic journals – bundling
•New scholarly comms models
emerging – especially open
access
Arts and Humanities
•Not just traditional academic
researchers
•Increasing interdisciplinarity and
collaboration
•Fewer foreign-language literate
researchers
•Changing user needs in digital
age – some disciplines ‘going
digital’ more quickly than others
Social Sciences
•Diverse users including theoreticians
and practitioners
•Research needs vary from big data
sets to traditional monographs
•Collection has patchy strengths but
has been less prominent historically
•Resource discovery challenges
Sources of information
Medical and
biological
sciences
Pre-prints
Conference
proceedings
Books
Datasets
Other
Arts and
humanities
6.3%
.9%
3.9%
71.6%
69.3%
5.8%
.5%
.6%
1.4%
9.2%
50.0%
35.9%
4.3%
3.4%
7.8%
2.0%
2.9%
3.7%
10.0%
14.6%
.5%
2.0%
8.7%
4.1%
8.0%
4.9%
90.7%
28.0%
27.2%
1.0%
1.0%
1.2%
2.3%
.5%
Other textual
Non-textual
Languages
and area
studies
1.0%
Technical reports
Govt or NGO
reports
Legal sources
Social
sciences
1.4%
Post-prints
Journal articles
Physical
sciences
and
engineering
5.8%
.6%
2.5%
4.8%
JISC, 2005
Informal mechanisms of locating
information
Asking a
colleague
Medical
and
biological
sciences
Physical
sciences
and
engineering
Social
sciences
Languages
and area
studies
Arts and
humanities
Emailing a
colleague
or peer
Reading
email
newsletters
80.2%
87.0%
17.9%
Posting an
enquiry to
an email
list
11.7%
Reading
blogs
81.9%
81.9%
21.9%
12.4%
4.3%
76.0%
78.2%
35.6%
15.1%
7.1%
74.0%
80.0%
16.0%
12.0%
2.0%
76.7%
79.6%
31.1%
21.4%
6.8%
4.3%
JISC, 2005
Resource discovery tools
Other
Subject-specific
abstracts and
indexes
Subject-specific
online
gateways
General
bibliographic
resources
Citation
databases
Search engines
Work of
reference
Medical and
biological
sciences
13.0%
Physical
sciences and
engineering
5.7%
Social
sciences
6.7%
Languages
and area
studies
8.0%
Arts and
humanities
3.9%
18.5%
20.6%
22.4%
6.0%
13.6%
22.8%
3.3%
6.7%
2.0%
2.9%
9.9%
11.5%
15.2%
46.0%
29.1%
21.0%
21.5%
9.9%
4.0%
3.9%
14.8%
36.4%
35.9%
24.0%
36.9%
0%
1.0%
3.1%
10.0%
9.7%
JISC, 2005
Availability of resources



A lot of what I want is in Baghdad… (Cuneiform
studies)
Archives are widely scattered. Library holdings of
journals and printed sources are patchy even in
London. It all means much travelling and time
wasted. (Naval and maritime history)
The list of journals taken by our University
Library is reduced each year; this is certainly not
peculiar to my particular interests (Economics)
Availability of e-content (arts and
humanities)
Yes
Some
No
Journals
55.5
25.4
10.1
Books
6.4
14.4
78.2
Manuscripts
4.5
19.3
76.1
Archives
3.6
0
96.4
Editions and sources
46.2
19.2
34.6
Maps
32.0
24.0
44.0
Newspapers
50.0
27.8
22.2
Rare books
16.7
44.4
38.9
Government
documents
5.0
31.2
18.2
New opportunities opened up by eresources

I am beginning to explore using 3-D modelling of buildings and
computer replications of lighting effects. (Byzantine art history)

Interactive survey data, newspaper archives world wide.
(Sociology, Anthropology)




Digital versions of government documents allow one to perform
your own analysis on them (e.g. coding voluminous documents for
subsequent quantitative analysis. (Public policy and
administration).
Electronic data sources are essentially new in their richness and
scale. (Economic and social history)
The A2A site has opened up a wealth of searchable catalogues for
archives a cross the country. This has made locating interesting
material much more convenient. (Early modern history)
Neuro-imaging databases such as the one at Dartmouth in US.
(Psychology)
What do academics want ?










More electronic content from desktop
Continuing/long-term access
Maintaining authenticity and integrity of e-resources
Electronic access to primary materials
More backfiles (e.g. popularity of JSTOR)
Reliable IT
Explain the maze (I&A; full-text; aggregator; OPAC; etc.)
Seamless access/transitions
Customisation
“In-time” service
How can libraries support
researchers?

Liaison

Publishers of content

Support for Cyberinfrastructure
•
Online access to complete credentialled, archival literature.
•
Stewardship and curation services for enormous collections of scientific data.
•
Digital repositories for diverse digital objects as instructional material and works in progress.
•
Digitized special collections.
•
More continuous (vs. batch) and open forms of scholarly communication.
•
Individual and community customization information services.

Licensing and access

Cost

Publisher practices: bunding