Frontiers | The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information | Research Metrics and Analytics

Abstract:  The scholarly knowledge ecosystem presents an outstanding exemplar of the challenges of understanding, improving, and governing information ecosystems at scale. This article draws upon significant reports on aspects of the ecosystem to characterize the most important research challenges and promising potential approaches. The focus of this review article is the fundamental scientific research challenges related to developing a better understanding of the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. Across a range of disciplines, we identify reports that are conceived broadly, published recently, and written collectively. We extract the critical research questions, summarize these using quantitative text analysis, and use this quantitative analysis to inform a qualitative synthesis. Three broad themes emerge from this analysis: the need for multi-sectoral cooperation and coordination, for mixed methods analysis at multiple levels, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Further, we draw attention to an emerging consensus that scientific research in this area should by a set of core human values.

From the body of the paper: 

"Consider the Grand Challenge's call for research into the determinants of engagement and participation in the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. Understanding those drivers requires consideration of a question raised by Maron et al. (2019) regarding the costs of labor required for open-source infrastructure projects, including the potentially inequitable distribution of unpaid labor in distributed collaborations. Similarly, NASEM–BRDI (2018) and NDSA (2020) delineate the basic and applied research necessary to develop both the institutional and technical infrastructure of stewardship, which would enable the goal of long-term durability of open access to knowledge. Finally, NASEM-BCBSS (2019) and Hardwicke et al. (2020) together characterize the range of research needed to systematically evaluate and improve the trustworthiness of scholarly and scientific communications. ..."