The New Kaleidoscope of Scholarly Communication Steven Wheatley Vice President American Council of...

The New Kaleidoscope of Scholarly Communication

Steven WheatleyVice President

American Council of Learned Societies

Cornell UniversityJune 7, 2007

Ithaca, New York

Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006

Four score and seven years ago(4 x 20 = 80 + 7 = 87)

• new nation• liberty• created equal

Problems of Scholarly Publishing, 1959


Conclusions:

• Scholarly publishing is not and cannot realistically be expected to be self-supporting

• The uncomplicated scholarly manuscript of good quality will find a publisher


But certain kinds of manuscripts will have difficulties:

• Highly specialized • Too long as an article/ too short as a

book• Using specialized materials• The scholarly tool work


Solutions:• Technology: micropublication,

XeroX• Funding: “the provision of

appropriately administered funds. [from] the generosity of one or more of the philanthropic foundations. . .”

On Research Libraries, 1967


“American research libraries . . .are all faced with refractory problems that impede their satisfactory performance.” p. xiv


Problems:

• Inadequate bibliographic apparatus

• Inadequate funding• Automation (“both a problem

and a promise”)


Recommendations:

• National Commission on Libraries, which would coordinate acquisition and bibliographic policies

• Increased Federal and private funding

Scholarly Communication, 1979


• Motivated by “widespread concern in the academic community that a crisis in finance threatened the performance of research libraries and the viability of scholarly publishing” – p. 1


Conclusion• “The extraordinary growth of the

scholarly enterprise in the last two decades requires important qualitative changes in the way certain scholarly materials are published, disseminated, stored and made available.”– P. 11


Recommendations• National bibliographic system,

periodical center, library agency• Broader role for foundations• NEH Office of Scholarly

Communication• ACLS, ARL, and AAUP Standing

Committee on Technology

www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure

Commission MembersPaul CourantProvost, EconomicsUniversity of Michigan

Sarah FraserArt HistoryNorthwestern University

Mike GoodchildGeographyUC Santa Barbara

Margaret HedstromSchool of InformationUniversity of Michigan

Charles HenryVP & CIORice University

Peter B. KaufmanVP, Innodata-IsogenPresident, Intelligent Television

Jerome McGannEnglishUniversity of Virginia

Roy RosenzweigHistoryGeorge Mason University

John Unsworth (Chair)Library and Information ScienceUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Bruce ZuckermanReligionUniversity of Southern California

Why a report?

Potential of Cyberinfrastructure

“New information technologies empower research on traditional objects of study.”

ACLS Report, p. ii

Necessity of Cyberinfrastructure

“Most expression of human creativity in the United States will be ‘born digital.’ The intensification of computing as a cultural force makes the development of a robust cyberinfrastructure an imperative for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences”

ACLS Report, p.ii

What is Cyberinfrastructure?

“an effective and efficient platform for the empowerment of specific communities of researchers to innovate and eventually revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.” -- NSF Report

What is Cyberinfrastructure?

Discipline-specific software Expertise Best Practices Tools Collections Policies Collaborative

environments

ACLS Report, p. 6

Necessary Characteristics

•Accessible as a public good

•Sustainable

•Interoperable

•Facilitate collaboration

•Support experimentation

Recommendations

1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure as a strategic priority.

2. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access.

3. Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors.

Recommendations (cont’d)

4. Cultivate leadership.

5. Encourage digital scholarship.

6. Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure.

Recommendations (cont’d)

7. Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools.

8. Create extensive and reusable digital collections.

Invest in Cyberinfrastructure

Create Extensive Digital Collections

Encourage Digital Scholarship


Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion

Recommendation:

• “The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph. ..”


Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion

Recommendation:• “Departments and institutions should recognize the

legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.”


Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,Art History and its Publications in the

Electronic Age• “While art history continues to be a

field of lively intellectual investigation and scholarship, its system of scholarly publication does not serve the discipline or general readership as well as it could.”


Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,Art History and its Publications in the

Electronic Age Recommendations

• “Support libraries in their efforts to use the internet to make copyrighted and orphan works available at the lowest possible cost to the widest communities of readers.”


Hillary Ballon and Mariet Westermann,Art History and its Publications in the Electronic Age

• “Develop online publication genres and formats that take advantage of museum exhibition as sites of research and appear during and after the exhibitions.

• Enhance the mission of university presses in terms of knowledge dissemination and scholarly communication rather than book publishing alone, and connect some of their programs more closely with their namesake universities and libraries .”

Foster Openness and Access

http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure

The New Kaleidoscope of Scholarly Communication Steven Wheatley Vice President American Council of...

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