A Network Approach to Scholarly Communication Infrastructure (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu
abernard102@gmail.com 2015-04-30
Summary:
"The open-access movement, fueled by the digital revolution, is transforming the business of scholarly communication, affecting the entire value chain. Rapidly emerging technologies have been crucial enablers of this transformation, blurring traditional roles and attracting new participants. The infrastructure and the economic framework established to support a centuries-old model of scholarly publishing are no longer adequate to the task. We believe that a radically different approach is required—one that is open, flexible, collaborative, and networked.
What does that mean? If we look at how digital publishing generally and open-access publishing specifically have evolved, what we see is a project-based approach. From PLOS to Collabra, from Knowledge Unlatched and PeerJ to the Open Library of Humanities, from ArXiv and SCOAP3 to LOCKSS and the Digital Preservation Network—and others too numerous to mention—each represents a separate project or platform, with each taking a different but similar approach to dealing with an increasingly dynamic landscape. Each project has a purpose and a specific issue it intends to address, with stated goals and explicit deliverables. Each project also has a unique funding model, although quite often many of them are similar. Still, how often can all of these projects draw from the same wells (usually funders for startup money and libraries for ongoing support), especially since there are new projects and players all the time?
We are not the first to recognize the precarious nature of the current situation. Alma Swan and Caroline Sutton point out: 'Many significant [infrastructure] services still depend on such 'soft' funding sources.'1 In response, the team established the Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA) to 'facilitate easy access to Open Access resources by providing a free-to-use discovery service for all users and a means to enable libraries to integrate Open Access publications in their services (library catalogues, web-portals etc.)' Similarly, in 2012 the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Vanderbilt University created the Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education to 'examine emerging national-scale digital projects and their potential to help transform higher education in terms of scholarly productivity, teaching, cost-efficiency, and sustainability.' Both of these initiatives recognize and highlight the need to establish a more comprehensive infrastructure across higher education.
Overlaying the current open-access environment is another layer of complexity. At the same time that we are trying to build the necessary infrastructure, the elements that compose scholarly communication are changing. For hundreds of years, books and journals have been the defining products of both the mode of communication and what counted as the record of research and scholarship that needed to be collected and preserved. In a recent OCLC Research report, the authors discuss how new technologies are influencing the nature of scholarly communication and what constitutes the scholarly record. It is now possible, and increasingly required, to include the evidence or 'raw materials' of research, such as data sets and computer models, alongside the more traditional outputs—all of which could become part of the scholarly record.2 And increasingly, research and learning objects developed from that research are presented in formats uniquely created for use in an online environment, from interactive textbooks to multimodal web projects.
Stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem have struggled to connect these projects to some kind of coherent and functioning whole. To build a scalable and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure, we need to take a more holistic view of the entire system. The infrastructure has to accommodate new workflows—from discovery to preservation—and it must be built on a solid funding model.
But what do we mean when we talk about infrastructure in the context of scholarly communication? ..."