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February 22, 2006
Nancy Davenport's Keynote on Scholarly Communications
Some notes from the latest keynote. Didn't get everything but it captures the basics.
Nancy Davenport
President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
Scholarly Communications
What are the issues?
What are the options
What are the leadership issues?
Spent much of her professional life in research circles, not academic circles, but has focused more on academic POV in the last two years.
Library: the documentation of human endeavour; an unbroken line in the human record.
A portion of that documentation propels research and scholarship; supports learning.
A collection is the product of cultural movments
120,000 librarians involved in collection development for academic libraries. "A lot of us are collecting the same stuff.... But we have to figure out ways to become a bit smarter for things that are unique to our institutions."
Scholars are the supply and the demand. Research has to be distributed, through print, e-format, open access, repositories, self-publishing, even blogs.
Who is in the middle, mediating scholarly discussions? Societies, reviewers, publishers - for profit and nonprofit - aggregators, librarians, provosts, administrators, the Internet.
Peer review is what every scholar wants - to be judged as an exemplar by their colleagues.
Publishers started as printers only, but over time, they began to accrue some of the attributes of research societies. They took on the best scholars as reviewers. Later, aggregators came along - companies acting as distributing agents of scholarly work, as opposed to RSS aggregators. These traditional aggregators also do similar work online, customizing services for librarians. Meanwhile, the provosts control the purse strings while librarians ask for more.
Supply: scholars, researchers, reviewers, societies
Demand: scholars, researchers, societies, teacher, public, industry
Motivations:
Scholars have new knowledge to share; stature, impact, tenure, ego - journal as a branding device
Publishers: profit (or not); stature; impact; market share - journal also as a branding device
Libraries: Build collections, satisfy scholars, maximize buying power, institutional stature, personal stature, persistence
Digital scholarship: only way to integrate disparate content, allows new research and scholarship, encourages using material in new ways, creates new fields and communities of practice, creates new knowledge.
CLIR call to action: tells publishers that librarians want independent, third party preservation of your content
"The academic community is built upon a sham. More an more you don't own your content - you're paying rent."
What impedes open access?
The academic reward system. Tenure requires publishing in "the right journals."
Scientists can put open access fee into their budgets. But in the humanities, you don't get that kind of funding. PloS.org won't work for most humanities scholars.
Level of support outside the sciences.
Scholarly style; it took respect to make the Human Genome Project to work. Humanities has a different dynamic. Individual interpretation is valued more than collaborative interpretation. So working in a collaborative environment can be difficult in scholarly humanities research.
U of Virginia: Valley of the Shadow website. Examines two Shenandoah Valley towns before during and after the civil war. They've digitized every bit of data they can get their hands on.
Projects like this aren't easy. It takes stature and authority to make these kinds of changes happen.
Where are we now? We pay a lot of money. Most institutions are paying 24% for digital serial journals in their collections budget. Libraries each pay large fees to access the same material. Meanwhile, libraries are digitizing their own special, unique materials.
Search strategies are becoming even more important - recall and precision.
New research methods within disciplines
Share what is in common; focus on the local, the unique
Get it into the classroom!
Posted by acarvin at February 22, 2006 12:44 PM
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