Welcome to this special themed issue of New Review of Academic Librarianship. When the editor, Graham Walton, contacted me, way back in December 2009, to ask if I would be prepared to be guest editor for a themed issue on “Dissemination Models in Scholarly Communication,” I was very happy to accept. When it was further explained that this issue was to be sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in order that it could be made immediately available on open access, I was even happier. So, the first thing I should say is a big thank you to JISC for the sponsorship and support that they have given all along the production route.
It was agreed at an early stage that we would produce a call for papers for the issue and this was done in March 2010. We were delighted that the call attracted 26 proposals for papers from around the globe. The high quality and significance of the proposals made the selection process difficult, but as you can see, we have eventually published 11 papers on a range of issues relating to the theme of disseminating scholarly communications.
Without doubt, the scholarly communication process is changing. Open access is clearly beginning to impact traditional publishing models, challenging commercial and not-for-profit journals and book publishers alike. The role of librarians in championing open access through the setting-up and populating of institutional repositories (IRs) and undertaking advocacy campaigns within their institutions is making an impact. Academics attitudes to open access are changing (albeit slower than many might have hoped) and many academic institutions are taking up the baton with a number of leading institutions across the globe mandating deposit in IRs. The role of research funding bodies is crucial in this respect and, more and more, are examining their strategy toward the way in which publically funded research is disseminated. Web 2.0 applications will have an increasing role in the scholarly communication process. While research shows that take-up in academia is at a relatively low level (although at least two UK-based Vice Chancellors now have a Twitter following), many publishers are providing wiki-based forums for specific journals or disciplines facilitating discussion on, and sharing of, research findings.
Articles in this issue cover a broad range of topics. Several discuss issues relating to institutional and subject-based repositories such as project management and interaction with, and engagement of, research communities. Puplett describes the Economists Online Subject Repository which is aggregating the subject-specific content of a group of participating library IRs and encouraging greater collaboration to promote open access. The important, yet rather neglected, topic of data curation is examined by Macdonald and Martinez-Uribe, who argue that by connecting with research communities and utilizing strategic and policy judgment, a robust data repository infrastructure can be created. Important research on the attitude of authors/users and their behaviors is ongoing, particularly, with regard to open access. For example, work by Creaser et al. demonstrates that there are big differences in understanding among scholars from different disciplines and their motivation for depositing and utilizing open access. And, while most open access initiatives focus upon journal articles, two articles in this issue examine open access to humanities and social science books. The first, from a library perspective (Adema and Schmidt), draws on the work of the Open Access Publishing in European Network (OAPEN) Project, and the second from the publisher perspective (Look and Pinter), examines business models and costs. The commissioned article from Michael Mabe provides a perspective from which we can judge achievements and progress to date. His long view of scholarly communication takes us on a journey exploring how we got to where we are now as well as how and why things may (or may not) change in the future.