Final lecture: The future of scholarly communication, or

what have we learned?

Honors 105 - NJohn

November 30, 2006

In the beginning

• 1 original and some copies

• Very little survived

• Restricted access

• Scholarly information circulated among the literate

• Mostly a gentleman’s endeavor - male, wealthy (or sponsored) or men of religion

Enter Gutenberg

• Movable type led to faster printing and more copies at a lower price

• Rise of the publishers

• Need for copyright

• Appearance of scholarly societies

• Development of universities and disciplines

Industrial Age - 19th century

• Mechanized printing– Linotype– Lithography

• Increasing scientific discoveries• A literate public• Widespread availability of printed works• Rise of the mass market book and mass

market magazine, the newspaper

The 20th century

• The race for atomic energy• Search for cures to polio, tuberculosis etc.• Exploding scientific knowledge• Exponential growth in universities and university

faculty• Rise of the scholarly monograph (book) and

scholarly journal• Rapid expansion of disciplines - especially in the

sciences and social sciences

Late twentieth century

• Development of personal computers and electronic networks

• Spread of communication technologies: email, Web, blogs, wikis

• Rise of a monopoly on scholarly communication:• Fewer scholarly books published / higher prices

• More scholarly journals published / higher prices

• Licensing restrictions to limit access and uses of content

21st century

• Open access movement– Eprints– NIH– SPARC– E-access in the developing world– Scholars self-archiving (Web sites)

• Scholar’s blogs• Pre-print servers - www.arxiv.org

The Future

• Recent NIH activity• University digital repositories

– Capturing ephemeral research and teaching data

• Modest moves by publishers• Moves by libraries and scholars

– Open Access - Open Content - Open Source– Blogs and wikis– Alternatives to waiving copyright

• Keeping it• Creative Commons licenses• Copyleft

The Challenges to the Future

• Competition in information access is coming from in Internet Community:– Britannica vs. Wikipedia– Journals vs. digital repositories– Indexes and catalogs vs. Google and Yahoo!

• Will our paper ‘legacy’ scholarly information be converted to bits?

• If scholars move to self-publishing, how will knowledge be authenticated?

• If articles are sold by the use, will journals disappear?