Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Scholarly communications: the
publisher's view
Ian Russell
Background
For the future of digital information to be orderly, that information
must be discoverable, accessible, structured, interoperable, linked,
semantically tagged and well identified; it must have clear provenance
and good version control; and it must be preserved and curated. There
must also be a means of bestowing authority on the corpus of literature
in order to give the readers a quick but effective way of assessing the
importance or likely importance of anything that they come across.
Nowadays it needs to embrace both formal and informal scholarly
communications (to include not only scholarly journals and
monographs but also blogs, wikis, tweets and whatever else web users
throw at it). And, of course, all this needs to have a sustainable and
robust funding mechanism behind it and to be scalable to deal with the
ever-increasing outputs from scholarship.
There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the future of digital
scholarly information will be orderly. Research efficiency depends on it
and is something that will be increasingly scrutinized as funders and
research establishments look to maximize the impact of the research
that they are associated with. For the most part, the academy will also
demand organization, although there are currently widespread
instances where academics act in their individual interests rather than
for the collective benefit of scholarship, for example by storing data only
on un-networked computers in their labs. The question, then, is how we
get to this orderly future. What barriers are in the way and what
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