Archives
Scholarly communication, academic publishing to be topics of conference
By DONNA BUDNIEWSKI
Reporter Assistant Editor
An electronic revolution in academic publishing and scholarly communication is occurring at an exponential rate. The transmission of information and research via emerging technology offers new benefits for scholars in making information more freely available to the public, yet it also introduces new concerns about copyrights and permanent access to digitally stored scholarly work, which puts university and college libraries at a major crossroads. Their vital role in facilitating scholarly communication and research is being challenged by the rapidly changing digital landscape and strained by already constricted library budgets. Shrinking financial resources, coupled with the skyrocketing cost of journals and other published materials, have forced many institutions around the country to cancel or scale back subscriptions to even the most in-demand and renowned journals.
These concerns have prompted the academic community at UB to form the ScholCom Group (SCG) to consider such issues as the rising cost of scholarly journals, archiving of material to ensure permanent and consistent access to content, the free exchange of information and the impact of ever-increasing control by fewer and fewer publishers on scholarship. Also at issue is the impact these changes have on the peer-review system and scholarly productivity.
In an attempt to heighten awareness of these critical issues in the area of scholarly communication, SCG will host a conference, "Publishing the Future: Scholarly Communication in an Information Age," from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus. The conference is free for members of the UB community and $25 for all others. Anyone interested in attending should register at http://libweb. lib.buffalo.edu/ScholCom/index.htm.
The conference will bring together nationally recognized leader in traditional and emerging scholarly communication forums to address these issues. Digital modalities that facilitate the exchange of scholarly research findings will be presented against the backdrop of traditional academic publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
Barbara von Wahlde, associate vice president of university libraries, says the issues associated with the crisis in scholarly communication are based on a few important factors.
"The system of scholarly communication—writing articles and publishing them in journals—basically took hold in the 19th century and has continued to this day. Along the way, scholarly research became an important commodity for academics and universities," von Wahlde explains. "Libraries supported the system by purchasing the journals, as academics supported the system by doing the research, writing and editing.
"In the past several years, commercial publishers of scholarly journals have raised their prices out of line with prices for other products. University money to purchase the intellectual capitol of the scholarly community, as delegated to libraries, has not kept pace with the CPI nor the abnormally high inflation rates of journals," she says. "Certainly our budgets can't take it any more."
Yet in spite of these concerns, there are positive changes on the horizon as institutions band together to grapple with a deluge of related issues.
Carole Ann Fabian, the newly named director of the Educational Technology Center and member of SCG, notes that a wealth of Web-based services for pre-print collections, data warehouses, collaboration systems and national and international repositories is working toward providing open access to ideas, methods, results and conclusions, speeding the progress of research and bringing its benefits to the public. For example, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) provides free access to scientific and medical research articles. Cornell-based Project Euclid provides free and low-cost access to mathematics and statistics research, and includes commercial, independent and discipline-based organizational publications. University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research (ICPSR) provides online access to social science data to more than 500 member organizations.
Fabian says that tremendous opportunities for enhanced access to scholarly research are becoming available.
"Online technologies and new communication forums provide a range of publication and dissemination options for academic authors," Fabian says. "Members of SCG are interested in exploring alternate institutional and disciplinary repository systems potentially available to our faculty. We are also interested in the ramifications of these emerging forums on academic culture.
"With the incidence of alternate modalities, however, we are challenged with developing a new framework for permanent and persistent access to content and protections for intellectual property shared in the digital environment," she says. Initiatives at other research institutions supported by such academic organizations as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), as well as emerging standards for digital initiatives (including the Open Archives Initiative and the Budapest Open Access Initiative), provide interesting models for that framework, she adds.
"We are in a period of ferment within the system and many players have a stake in the results," notes von Wahlde. "It is time for the campus to understand the present turmoil and to set a direction that will work for us and influence future disciplinary approaches."
Adds Fabian: "We are at an exciting moment for the academy—poised to create change in a century-old academic publishing tradition and challenged to publish the future in innovative ways."