Improving The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11331)

Abstract: The dissemination of knowledge derived from research and scholarship has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is changing the way things work; two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. But the use of this technology remains limited. Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. This document highlights the findings of the Force11 workshop on the Future of Research Communication held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011: it summarizes a number of key problems facing scholarly publishing today, and presents a vision that addresses these problems, proposing concrete steps that key stakeholders can take to improve the state of scholarly publishing.