Introduction

STM publishing takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication, which includes both formal and informal elements. Scholarly communication plays different roles at different stages of the research cycle, and (like publishing) is undergoing technology-driven change. Categorising the modes of communication into one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, and then into oral and written, provides a...

Research and scholarship lead to the generation of new knowledge. The dissemination of this knowledge has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is...

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term 'open access' in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of...

This paper discusses the ways in which the internet has profoundly changed how we produce, use and collect research and information for public policy and practice, particularly focusing on the benefits and challenges presented by grey literature. The authors argue that grey literature (i.e. material produced and published by organisations without recourse to the commercial...