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This page contains references to a highly selective collection of articles, reports, organizations and social media that provide an introduction to important issues in the scholarly communications field.
The Association of College and Research Libraries defines scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." - "Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1"
The websites featured in the following RSS reader are a good way to keep track of the latest topics and discussions in the scholarly communication community.
The following organizations are invested in scholarly communications issues:
ACRL , the Association of College & Research Libraries, is a large division of the American Library Association which provides significant resources in scholarly communication, including webcasts and documentation, available here. They also provide a detailed Scholarly CommunicationToolkit for libraries.
ARL, the Association of Research Libraries, began the SPARC program (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,) an international alliance of academic and research libraries “working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.”) At the SPARC website, you can view their scholarly communication activities and the newsletter they sponsor, the SPARC Open Access Newsletter & Forum, as well as SPARC e-news.
AAUP, the Association of American University Presses, has about 130 members. Its sponsored report topics include scholarly publishing and intellectual property.
CLIR, the Council on Library and Information Resources, publishes a free e-newsletter, CLIR Issues, that often discusses scholarly communication topics. One of their programs is the Digital Library Federation .
Educause is a technology-focused higher education organization that provides conferences, membership divisions, and reports relating to higher education issues. For example, a recent article by James G. Neal focuses on Prospects for Systemic Change Across Academic Libraries.
The Medical Library Association provides information on scholarly communication and publishing issues.
The Music Library Association publishes regular reports on copyright and other topics relevant to scholarly communication.
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is a 30 year old organization whose membership comes from all aspects of scholarly publishing. They sponsor an annual conference that welcomes faculty and librarians.
ALPSP, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, is the international complement to SSP.
AAU, the Association of American Universities, has a Scholarly Roundtable that released its Report and Recommendations in January 2010. An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academics urged federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
SCI, the Scholarly Communications Institute, holds an annual meeting every summer at the University of Virginia. 2010’s topic was Emerging Genres in Scholarly Communication . Genres identified included digital collections (or a curated database,) scholarly blogs, multimedia argument, and media-based sound studies; 2011’s topic is New-Model Scholarly Communication: Road Map for Change.
Creative Commons provides the infrastructure for sharing ones’ work via various types of intellectual property licensing.
OASIS, the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook, contains practical steps for open access for publishers, students, librarians, researchers, and others.
JISC is an organization of UK colleges and universities interested in sharing information and promoting open access to data. The group provides a toolkit with techniques for measuring open access impact.
Funded by JISC, the Repositories Support Project has begun a 5.5 year initiative to build UK higher education repository capacity, knowledge and skills, and move forward a vision of a network of interoperable repositories for papers, data, and learning objects.
Open Access Map , Charting the growth and development of open access globally
You can find articles about scholarly communications in the Penn State Scholarly Communications Zotero Group. Please feel free to browse the articles in the group's library, and consider joining and contributing resources of your own!
Note: Some of the links to the readings in the Zotero library may be accessible only to current Penn State faculty, staff and students. Those outside the Penn State community may need to consult a local library for interlibrary loan possibilities.
