Trends in Scholarly Communication: Challenges and Opportunities toLibraries

Abstract

Scholarly communication is in turmoil. It is not clear how scholarly publishers will cope with change or if journals will even survive. That’s why it is important to provide some insight into scholarly publishing now and in the future. The key issues confronting scholarly publishing include open access (OA), peer review, institutional repositories, multiple versions of articles, increasing author awareness of copyright issues, archiving and preserving, and faster communication tools such as blogs, Web sites, RSS feeds, and podcasts. The newer communication tools speed up communication and bypass journals. In this environment, scholars may communicate in new ways and journals may have a different role from the past, but documents of record are still essential to the business.