University Publishing in a Digital Age

II. What the World Looks Like Today and Where it is Headed: A. The future of scholarly communications

In this section we will provide a description of what the world of university publishing looks like today and where it appears to be heading. These views are largely drawn from our research and have been refined through feedback from a group of people asked to comment on initial drafts of this report. We try to summarize consensus views and recount noteworthy statements from our interviewees. We will also try to note cases where the views of our interviewees may not be representative of their peer group.

1. Everything must be electronic

Most of our interviewees were in agreement that information technology is profoundly transforming the ways in which universities disseminate their primary outputs, the types of content that are produced and shared, and the ways scholars consume research. As one director of a major library put it, “The tipping point has tipped to electronic. Everything needs to be online.” While this viewpoint is more strongly held by enthusiasts of information technology, it strikes us as a fair representation of the direction in which scholars, especially the younger generation, are headed. Content may still be used in different formats (many scholars find articles online and then print them locally) and on different devices (iPods, handheld readers), but increasingly it must be at least discoverable online to reach readers.

2. Scholars will rely on deeply integrated electronic research/publishing environments

Looking to the future, scholars will increasingly seek to work in electronic research and publishing environments. These environments will provide them with the tools and resources for conducting research, collaborating with peers, sharing working papers, publishing conference proceedings, manipulating data sets, etc. Several interviewees noted that continuous publishing (also described in this paper as “dynamic content”) will enable scholars to continually update or correct “published” works, requiring new ways of thinking about and documenting versions and editions[18]. It seems likely that much of this activity will be organized around disciplines, as suggested by enterprises such as arXiv in physics and RePec in economics. AnthroSource, developed by the American Anthropological Society with help from the University of California Press, is an attempt to create such an environment for anthropologists. We heard descriptions of elements of a future in which discipline-based portals offer scholars a range of electronic tools for data manipulation, content creation, and social networking, and a layered, interlinked platform containing a wide variety of content – from fee-based to free – including:
• traditional peer-reviewed published material (monographs, journals, reference works)
• multimedia projects
• raw primary source material (data sets, gray literature)
• primary source material designed with the interpretative and conceptual insights of scholars
• conference proceedings and other non-peer-reviewed output from universities
• pre-print workspaces that allow scholars to collaborate in advance of publication (working paper repositories)
• post-print conversation spaces that encourage scholarly communication (message boards, author sites, newsletters, blogs )
• dissertation repositories
• subject matter repositories

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Faculty have a strong desire for greater support in creating, validating and publishing their digital research output. University administrators need to think about how best to provide these services. They also need to think about how new forms of scholarship should be recognized and rewarded.

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3. Multimedia and multi-format delivery will become increasingly important

We heard from a number of sources that scholars increasingly wish to incorporate audio and video materials in their research and teaching. In the future, scholarship published online will be enhanced with embedded graphics, audio and video materials, all linked with datasets and applications needed to manipulate data, etc. Imagine, for example, an anthropological study of pre-literate societies with embedded audio clips of oral interviews, or a journal article in film studies that includes video clips, or a work of history that includes audio versions of speeches, or a work of science that includes complex animations. Building the infrastructure to support multimedia content – the storage capacity and connectivity, tools for creating and accessing content, archiving multimedia assets, etc. – requires substantial capital investment. Similarly, a new generation of devices for consuming information will require that content be organized and presented in new ways.

The librarians consulted for this study were more enthusiastic about the potential of multimedia than other constituents. Provosts tended to be more conservative, associating “publishing” primarily with books and journals. It is worth noting that in a previous study of scholarly communication in history, we heard about several projects that have attempted to pursue this kind of vision with mixed success. For example, the ACLS History e-Book has been very successful at making electronic versions of core literature available, but less so in propagating new multimedia based formats. Similarly, the Gutenberg-e prize works were expensive and time-consuming to produce, and we have heard that these resources did not seem justified by their level of impact. This is not atypical for new technologies, as expectations for new applications often race ahead of behavioral changes. This is especially true in academia, which has a strong conservative streak. However, when we look at the ways that younger scholars and undergraduates operate online, we have no doubt that this vision will eventually come to pass.

4. New forms of content will enable new economic models

Traditional economic models of publishing are being disrupted by the Web, and new ones are emerging. Universities must revisit traditional views about how publishing is supported. Creating and disseminating dynamic content imposes some new costs on the system (software tools, storage, bandwidth) and reduces others (printing, physical storage, distribution). The actors in the new system may be different, especially for user-generated content. Information technology provides an opportunity for universities to restructure the scholarly communications system in ways that better reflect the community’s values than the current system. This means having more influence over what gets published and how it is accessed and priced.

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Publishing increasingly occurs across a continuum, with subscription-based, highly controlled content at one end and free open access content at the other. One administrator described a future with a spectrum from open, contributed content such as self-published, non peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings etc. at one end, and edited, peer-reviewed journals, reference works, monographs, and new types of products enabled by the electronic environment at the other. There are cases where charging for access to content provides a useful model for sustaining certain resources and imposing discipline on the way investment resources are allocated. Likewise, there are also cases where universities will decide that it is consistent with their mission to provide content for free. Interviewees generally were not opposed to the notion of fee-based content, but a couple honed in on the notion of “fair pricing” as an important goal.