Abstract
The Future of Scholarly Communication is a very useful, interesting and timely book. It is an edited collection which explores a broad range of issues, from the highly specific question of cybertaxonomy to more general overviews about the various stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecology. Michael Jubb’s excellent introductory chapter situates the subject, offering explanations of the key debates and definitions of important concepts and terminology.
The main body of the book is divided into two sections, the first entitled ‘Changing research behaviour’ and the second ‘Other players: Roles and responsibilities’. The first section covers specific areas of research interest beginning with Henry Rzepa’s chapter on the changing nature of scholarly communications in chemistry research, which traces its history from emails to blogs and wikis. Fiona Courage and Jane Harvill provide a very interesting chapter on the Mass Observation data set and the ways in which Mass Observation is being revitalized as a digital resource while at the same time still operating as a physical archive. David Prosser contributes a more general history of scholarly communication in relation to the various research imperatives operating in modern scholarship such as the Research Excellence Framework. Prosser speculates about a future in which papers increasingly will be read by machines rather by humans, and asks:
If predictions that papers will increasingly be read by machines rather than by humans prove to be true, then surely these papers should be written in a style that makes them easier for machines to read? Why surround them with the trappings that humans need in order to render them readable? Publication could then be the expression of facts in a machine-readable way. The facts would not necessarily have to possess the ‘novelty’ or import that is traditionally expected of a paper-worthy result; and negative results could be included more easily than they are at present (p. 45).
I have concerns about the focus on facts here, but above and beyond my constructivist-orientated shudder at the use of the positivist sounding term, ‘fact’ without qualification, what I found interesting in this paragraph was that it reads like an echo, albeit distant, of Paul Otlet: ‘every document is an exposition of data, facts, and ideas … more or less well ordered, clearly formulated, strongly stylized’ (Otlet, 1934: 97). In Otlet’s system, these facts would be extracted from the document and represented through appropriate notation on a catalogue card. Different times, different technologies, but interesting how the ghost of Otlet’s documentary system hovers over the digital turn in scholarly communication.
Chapter 4, by Katie Anders and Liz Elvidge of Imperial College, deals with the ‘publish or perish’ culture of STEM subjects and reports results from the Vitae Innovate project. It is a fascinating exploration of the drivers towards, and also the barriers to creativity in research. Vincent Smith of the National History Museum deals with cybertaxonomy in Chapter 5 while Chapter 6 by John Wood explores the ‘Data deluge’, drawing together insights from three case studies, the ELIXIR project, the CLARIN project and the LifeWatch project. Ellen Collins’s chapter explores social media and scholarly communication, while Richard Bennett’s final chapter in the first section explores the changing role of the publisher in the age of Open Access (OA).
While I found the first part of the book interesting, particularly the chapters on Mass Communication and the Vitae Innovate project, I think it is in the inclusion of the chapters in Part 2 of this book that the real strength of the collection lies. The authors of these chapters range widely over the politics and the possibilities of the digital future, and, naturally, of OA in particular. Mike McGrath’s chapter on the changing role of the journal editor is extremely interesting as he unpacks some of the central conventions of traditional publishing such as the scholarly journal as article container and the centrality and reliability of peer review. This is an extremely engaging chapter, written with authority and some verve, and he convincingly makes the case that we might well be in the historical moment that Karl Marx was referring to in his insight that ‘the old economic system has outlived its usefulness but has not yet been supplanted by the new. In our context the commercial publishers have not yet been supplanted by repositories’ (p. 128).
Robert Kiley’s chapter on the perspective of the research funder explores the benefits of OA and discusses the Wellcome Trust in detail. Ian Carter considers the changing research strategy at institutional level in relation to OA, repositories and institutional communications more generally, while Mark L. Brown discusses the impact of the digital turn on the university library. In the final chapter, the perspective of the scholar is explored and Roger Schonfield uses the different needs of the scientist and the humanities scholar to discuss the changing user relationship with the university library.
Overall, this is a very useful introduction to a highly complicated area in which there are many stakeholders, many viewpoints and much debate. Open Access plays a major part in this book, being at least mentioned in most of the chapters, but the discussion goes beyond OA, and contextualizes OA in relation to digital documentation more generally. Its stated aim is to cover a wide range of issues of concern to all those with a stake in the scholarly communications process: governments and funders, universities and research institutes, publishers and librarians, researchers and other academics, and the host of people and organizations who are interested in research and its results (p. xv).
Such an aim is a bit of a tall order, as the editors acknowledge, but the book goes some way to providing an introduction to the players, the issues and the debate. All the chapters are worth reading, and some are extremely interesting indeed. It is certainly a book that I will be bringing to the attention of my students, not least because there are some avenues explored in part in this book that might well form the basis for future research projects.