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[Subbiah Arunachalam]

From: Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]


The scholarly communication system that scholars
deserve  


Herbert Van de Sompel, Sandy Payette, John Erickson,
Carl Lagoze, and Simeon Warner, Rethinking Scholarly
Communication: Building the System that Scholars
Deserve, D-Lib Magazine, September 2004. Excerpt: 

There is growing dissatisfaction with the established
scholarly communication system. This dissatisfaction
is the result of a variety of factors including
rapidly rising subscription prices, concerns about
copyright, latency between results and their actual
publication, and restrictions on what can be published
and how it can be disseminated. The result is a global
debate on how to remedy the system's deficiencies, and
that debate has inspired concrete initiatives aimed at
reforming the process. These are concerned mainly with
access issues and seek to alleviate two longstanding
problems. The first, known as the "serials crisis,"
addresses the often prohibitive prices of journal
publications that impede access to scholarly
materials. The second, known as the "permissions
crisis," addresses the restrictions on use of
publications once access has been obtained. The "Open
Access" movement focuses primarily on these two
problems with two different strategies. The
self-archiving school strives for a scholar's right to
make traditional journal publications freely available
in an open repository. The journal-reform school
promotes the emergence of new types of journals that
are free at the point of use. 

While the open availability of the results of
scholarly endeavors is indeed of fundamental
importance to the future of scholarship, it is only
one dimension of how the scholarly communication
process can be transformed. As Geneva Henry has
observed, opportunities abound in the world of 21st
century publishing and the discussion on transforming
scholarly communication must move beyond the debate of
subscription-based vs. open access publication. [...] 

Our vision is based on our belief that the future
scholarly communication system should closely
resemble—and be intertwined with—the scholarly
endeavor itself, rather than being its after-thought
or annex. We consider in this article the aspects of
the established system that constrain the scholarly
endeavor. Based on those considerations, we describe
the desired technological characteristics of a future
system of scholarly communication. We argue for a
scholarly communication system composed of an
interoperability substrate allowing flexible
composition of the value-adding services that up to
now have been vertically locked in the journal
publication milieu. In this loosely coupled system,
the units of scholarly communication (i.e., data,
simulations, informal results, preprints, etc.) could
follow a variety of scholarly value chains in which
each hub provides a service such as registering
results, certifying their validity, alerting scholars
to new claims and findings, preserving the scholarly
record, and ultimately rewarding scholars for their
work. 



	
	
		
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