Scholarly Communication in 2029: Using Scenarios to Predict an Uncertain Future

Uncertainty has been a challenge that academic libraries have been encountering and addressing since the digital world started making an impact. An area of uncertainty in the 1990s was the role that academic librarians would take if their services were no longer needed, for example, as intermediaries between students/academics and on-line databases. Scenario planning was successfully applied to establish what the implications of the intermediation uncertainty would be (Edwards, Day, & Walton, 1996). A more detailed overview of academic libraries and the use of scenario planning has been provided (Walton, 2009).

Twenty-five years later, the rapidly changing and uncertain scholarly communication environment is resulting in academic libraries and librarians trying to establish their role and contribution. In 2019, a similar scenario forecasting activity was completed to explore what scholarly communication could look like in 2029. The ten people involved were academic library practitioners, publishers, and Library and Information Science (LIS) academics. The United Kingdom, Germany, and North America were represented with participants having a combined total of around 250 years’ relevant, cumulative experience. The four-stage process used by Edwards, Day, and Walton (1996) was applied:

In Stage 1, three groups worked together to determine the Sociological, Technological, Economic, and Political (STEP) factors that were driving change in scholarly communication:

• Sociological: the expectation that everything will be online and free; therefore, access to information will be democratized (includes open access). There will be profile and identity issues for authors (where to publish); continuing concerns regarding “fake news” and a lack of trust in experts; pressure to publish in high impact journals will still be an issue as quality measures (such as impact factors) will remain important; a rise in data sharing/communities; and globalization (e.g., the growth of publishing in India and China).

• Technological: interoperability will scale across geographical boundaries; increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will amend elements of the publishing process (e.g., peer review); a multiplicity of platforms will mean more choice and more complexity. There will be a disruption in the unit of research as articles rather than issues of journals will be the currency; the university as open publisher will continue to rise; social media will enable collaboration; acquisitive vertical integration of information products will further shape the landscape and licensing/rights issues will demand investment, tools, and attention; and perpetual digital openness will lead to uncertainty regarding the future format of the book.

• Economic: financial sustainability of open access and Plan S implementation including Article Processing Charges will require new business models; metrics will command and drive publishing developments; publisher dominance, monopoly, and influence will be challenged; and there will be a rise in predatory journals.

• Political: the major political changes currently happening in numerous countries will impact open access and, in particular, Plan S will disturb publishing equilibrium; the importance of metrics will continue to grow; and government and funder mandates will further globally connect and align.

After agreeing to the drivers, Stage 2 required those factors that were both important and uncertain to be separated from the others. This was achieved by discussion and the following agreed upon list of important and uncertain issues resulted:

• Sociological: equality in research communications; data sharing; globalization

• Technological: artificial intelligence; future of the internet; future of search

• Economic: Plan S; vertical integration of information products and systems; government funding

• Political: Plan S; open access

Stage 3 of the process involved three groups being charged with producing a scenario based on the identified important and uncertain issues that would capture the position in 2029. Three very different scenarios emerged:

Scenario 1: Mary, an early career academic, has a lecture to prepare for next week on Cornfield Development in the 21st Century. She is away at a conference all week; one morning before the first conference session she paces her hotel room and says “Academic Alexa, find 12 key sources on cornfield development please.” There follows a conversation that defines and narrows the search. Mary checks the results on her handheld device and likes what she finds. She asks Alexa to synthesize the articles, create a digital reading list for students, and produce some content for the virtual learning environment (VLE). Job done. Breakfast!

Scenario 2: A senior ex-Government member joins a well know European publisher’s board with responsibility for the research services portfolio for universities globally. Their brief on the Board is to answer the following questions:

• How can the services be made more profitable?

• Does the company need to demonstrate social responsibility/community impact and benefit?

• Should the company take a stronger role in driving research and bringing groups together?

He attends the Publisher’s Board Meeting, which includes employees, researchers, Vice Chancellors (global), Finance, Human Resources. The Board Meeting Agenda consists of the following:

1. Technical integration progress

2. Position Paper on “Impact of disintegration of European Union (EU) on Plan S/Research Infrastructure”

3. Response to social media campaign questioning value of experts

4. Managing impact of job losses through adoption of artificial intelligence

5. Setting up charitable trust to disburse profits.

Scenario 3: A Chinese early career researcher, mixed academic/practitioner linked to an institution/workplace has scholarly content to publish but is not sure of the best approach. She considers the following questions and wrestles with several variables:

• Where to publish? The variables are: disaggregation — no journal (making text/images/data/social media available as discrete units); no publisher; and local/international.

• How is it peer reviewed? The variables are: more experts (100+); automatic review identifiers (ORCID/Block Chain); language (important or not?); and artificial intelligence.

• How will it be delivered? The variables are: any language/auto-translate; and where and which platform?

• How will it be promoted? The variables are: will it be automatic and will it be self-promotion (no publisher/journal).

Stage 4 required the three groups that produced the different scenarios to collaboratively discuss the implications of the three scenarios. One immediate observation was that the words “library” and “librarian” had not been used in any scenario or discussion. Did this mean that the librarian role would not exist within scholarly communications in the future, or would it be so embedded that it did not need separate identification? The direction of the discussion was to agree that there would be new roles (or an extension of current roles) for academic libraries and their staff over the next ten years:

• Helping academics navigate the new scholarly communications landscape and decide how and where to publish their work for the best effect, including rights management and, possibly, identity management was seen as likely. The fragmentation of the scholarly unit was agreed to be a major trend driven by funder mandates, by open research and developing publisher models leading to increased disaggregation of structured outputs from publisher-owned content to author-owned; and text, data, and identity as distinct reusable research “objects.”

• Changes to the current peer review system were likely either through opening it up to more reviewers per article or cutting out much of the human input by using artificial intelligence through review algorithms.

• There will be an increasingly crucial role in verifying the quality of information, understanding issues of bias, and helping others to develop strategies to do this. New ways to search (Academic Alexa) could have implications for the quality of searches, which makes critical consideration of the information found even more important (e.g., will algorithms eventually make searches more uniform?). There are interesting questions of authorship and originality if search engines become capable of composing papers.

• Open access, in particular Plan S, was seen as a major driver of change (Plan S was mentioned by all groups multiple times). Plan S will have implications for where academics publish, and there will be a need for strong advocacy by librarians to ensure academics understand and can take advantage of the opportunities available to publish in open environments.

• Influencing and enabling the development of technology that will be interoperable and provide a seamless interface for staff and students will be important.

• Big business will remain part of the picture as the trend for vertical integration continues, and this will lead to a changed role for librarians in the supply chain.

As the planning exercise reviewed the possible landscape in 2029, it will not be known for another ten years whether this scenario planning exercise around scholarly communication uncertainty was accurate. Despite this, it has illuminated a key area of concern where high degrees of uncertainty and complexity abound in what has the potential to be a rapidly changing environment.

It should be noted that these scenarios were completed by the Editorial Board members of the New Review of Academic Librarianship in April 2019 in London, UK.

Roisin Gwyer
Accreditor, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, UK
[email protected]