• Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King
• Center for Studies in Higher Education

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01 January 2010Despite the increase in open access publishing peer-reviewed journals still hold sway in many academic disciplines according to this US study.

While many studies have addressed specific issues like the costs of launching academic journals and the finances of university presses, there has not yet been a broad-scale, comprehensive analysis focusing on how the university and its various stakeholders, most notably faculty, value traditional and emerging forms of scholarly communication.

The research focuses on understanding faculty needs and practices for in-progress scholarly communication as well as archival publication. Among the goals is providing a broader understanding of the full array of activities related to the scholarly communication lifecycle in order to enable the accurate assessment of the academy’s future communication and publication landscape.

The following are among the questions driving the work:
• What will scholars in various core disciplines want to do in their research and with their research results, and what new forms of communication do or do not support those needs?
• How will scholars want to disseminate and receive input on their work at various stages of the scholarly communication lifecycle?
• What are the emerging trends in research and publication practices?
• What is the scope and depth of pent-up demand for new models of communication in various sectors/disciplines?
• How do institutions and other stakeholders support these faculty needs, if at all?

We suggest that more innovation does and will occur first during in-progress communication than in final, archival publication. One can foresee a scenario where useful and effective innovations in in-progress communication may eventually serve to drive improvements in final, archival publication. It is therefore worthwhile to gain deeper
insight into the needs, motives, and new capabilities within in-progress communication as well as final, archival publication. We describe here our results based on the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. The report is divided into eight chapters, which include a document synthesizing
our methods and research results plus seven detailed disciplinary case studies.