Random thoughts on scholarly communication

[Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>]

From: Colin Steele <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>
Subject: Random thoughts on scholarly communication

Some random thoughts on a Saturday afternoon from Down Under.

I know that much of the debate focuses on specific issues, for example,
with the self-archiving option. I have no disagreement with this but I
believe in the long-term that we have to work within and focus on a
holistic approach to scholarly communication, see for example,
http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/respubs/changing_res_prac/exec_summary.htm
which looks at the framework of scholarly creation and knowledge. I accept
however that I am not sure however how long long is! In the meantime,
however, various people/groups are working on component parts such as the
OSI Working Group mentioned by Peter Suber.

A wider framework has to be placed within the political environment, so
that change comes not only at the individual level but also through a
framework that provides incentives to change scholarly communication
patterns. Not easy I know.

The Australian Research Universities, G08, have recently released a
statement by the Vice Chancellors. See Peter Suber's summary here.

"Today Australia's eight leading research universities (the Group of
Eight) released a Statement on open access to scholarly information! . In
the statement, the Group of Eight Vice-Chancellors "record their
commitment to open access initiatives that will enhance global access to
scholarly information for the public good." They pledge to support OA
initiatives at their respective universities, to support "digital
publishing practices" that provide high-quality scholarship at lower cost,
and to examine their "criteria for promotion" in light of the new OA
publishing models. (5/25/2004 11:44:02 AM)"

Similarly, the Australian National Scholarly Communication Forum is
attempting to place activity within research frameworks with hopefully
outcomes that will trickle down in due course to the individual academic
(see attached program). This conference has attracted the four major
Academies, the Chief Scientist, leading representatives of the Australian
Vice Chancellor's Committee and the Australian Research Council, so we
hope that we can bring issues to the attention of the community in a way
that the UK House of Commons Committee has done, although it's public
platform has been much wider and certainly very helpful in raising general
consciousness of the issues.

As a number of commentators have mentioned, such as Fred Friend and
Stephen Pinfield, the current issue with institutional repositories is to
increase their population. The issues are political and social rather than
technical. Institutional repositories in my opinion are far more than
simply the STM post-prints, so to speak, and this is reflected in the
depositing of material at ANU, both in the e-prints and D-Space
repositories. A way to proceed, which we are pursuing, and I know the
Dutch are also following up with, is to link with the research offices and
the research assessment exercises, which universities undertake. It is
relatively simple to link the metadata and the full text across, from such
exercises, into institutional repositories.

Until the academic community have the time and inclination to deposit
material automatically then someone else must be the catalyst. Why should
the library not take the lead and allocate staff time to this process? We
collectively spend large amounts of time and hundreds of millions of
dollars acquiring research information, considerable amounts of which are
still little used electronically, so why can't we spend a small proportion
of staff time on working with the academic community to place material in
institutional repositories? As the amount of material increases, so will
the spin-offs within an institutional setting, apart from the
opportunities for new metrics in terms of citation/impact.

The Elsevier ruling is undoubtedly welcome but will be somewhat cumbersome
to implement in the context of each individual academic and the library
may need to be the facilitator with them. The vast majority of the
academics surveyed in the recent UK City University Report, while
"troubled" by publishers, continue to be unaware of a lot of the issues
that we debate - what I have termed the sound of one hand clapping:
http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2004/

If the global research libraries purchase material at an input level, at
vast expense for the "public good" of their university, then the new
models of e-press, e-prints and D-Space may well be early examples of the
universities funding "public good" output of their institution. This is a
different attitude to the way that university presses have been regarded
in the past and subsequently closed down.  The CIC Report on Scholarly
Publishing, issued earlier this year, also reflects on the need for new
modes of scholarly communication and interrelationship.

There is no simple solution, it's going to be hybrid and in the near
future, messy and confusing, with a variety of models emerging and being
tested and being vigorously fought over. Let's not forget as a background
to specific debates, however, that we are working within the big picture
of scholarly communication and that change will be built upon the
composite building blocks of the research knowledge process, all of which
need to be examined but for which the research author and their
administrative "masters" are the crucial catalysts.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
W.K. Hancock Building (043)
The Australian National University  
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia

Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Fax +61 (0)2 612 55526
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au