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ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION:
News for the University of Illinois Community

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January 3, 2006

USC's Senate Proposals for Responding to the Challenges Facing Scholarly Communications

The University of California's Academic Council Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) has published in DRAFT form five White Papers and one Proposed Policy concerning how it's faculty can response to the challenges facing scholarly Communication.

From the Overview:
The papers define and explain the faculty’s view of changes that could improve dissemination of scholarly work to enhance the discovery and communication of new knowledge, and best serve the public interest.

The current model for many publications is that faculty write articles and books, referee them, edit them and then give them to a publisher with the assignment of copyright. The publisher then sells them back to the faculty and their universities, particularly to university research libraries. While there clearly are costs of publication, a number of publishers (particularly, but not always, for-profit corporations) earn munificent profits for their shareholders and owners. However, maximizing profits for these latter groups may work to the detriment of faculty, educational institutions and the public.

Meanwhile, opportunities to reduce production and distribution costs and to create innovative forms of publication and dissemination are increasingly manifest, and enabled by networked digital technologies, new business models, and new partnerships.
The papers explore this simultaneous challenge and opportunity from five starting points:

• One discusses copyright issues, and recommends that faculty authors adopt the practice of granting to publishers non-exclusive copyright of their research results, while retaining copyright for other educational purposes, including placing work in open access online repositories.
  
• Two consider recommended best practices, from a faculty viewpoint, for journal and book publishers respectively.
  
• One considers the role of scholarly societies in publishing, and recommends changes in some societies so that they may better support development and dissemination of scholarly work in their discipline, and at more economical cost.
  
• The final paper recognizes that technology has made and will continue to make available new methods of publishing and presenting new knowledge.
  

Posted by Katie Newman at January 3, 2006 11:15 AM

For comments on this page contact: Kaite Newman