New Modes of Scholarly Communication
The ways in which scholars and researchers communicate findings has changed with the affordances of electronic communication. On one hand, the Internet enables unprecedented dissemination possibilities, providing access to refereed publications and other scholarly documents to anyone in any global location with a network connection. On the other, it has affected scholarly publishing by enabling new publishing models. There are at least three important new ways in which the Internet enables the communication of scholars:
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Open Access Archives: The Internet gives scholars the means to provide unrestricted access to their publications, presentations, and other scholarly material by making it freely available over the Web.
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Open Access Publishing: The Internet gives scholarly publishers (both emergent and established) the means to distribute scholarly content electronically, which reduces costs associated with distribution of print media and enables alternatives to subscription-based business models.
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Other Means of Scholarly Communication: As Internet communication tools proliferate, so do the number of ways these tools are leveraged by scholars to express scholarly opinion and communicate research findings
To accommodate greater exchange and valuation of research, both discipline- and institution-specific Web-accessible open access scholarship repositories and archives have emerged. The institutional (or university) repositories, whose contents are often open access, offer several advantages to document authors over other types of supplementary Internet distribution, such as posting a paper on a personal Web page. Among them, the following:
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Institutional repositories are frequently sponsored or associated with university libraries and therefore benefit from the information-management expertise and the institutional support of librarians.
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Institutional repositories often admit articles and other documents in each area of research represented by the faculty of the institution itself, so faculty authors need not depend on the existence of a subject-based repository to extend open access to their research
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Institutionally based repositories can serve as access points for scholarly documents other than journal publications, such as working papers.
Among its e-Scholar digital repositories, Purdue University Libraries have established Purdue e-Pubs as an open access repository for the scholarly documents produced by members of the Purdue University community. Examples of documents in e-Pubs include journal articles, technical reports, presentations, and other research reports. Digital documents deposited with Purdue e-Pubs then become part of the libraries’ permanent, open access collection.
To take advantage of open access archives, scholarly authors must ensure they retain the rights to provide access to their work.
An author may choose, when preparing any formal publication, to publish with a journal that provides open access immediately on publication. There are many journals that publish only open access articles, and many well-established journals offer open access publishing options. Publishers of open access articles eliminate subscription fees and accommodate the expense of publishing through a variety of business models. Institutional memberships and publication fees paid by departments, grantors, or the authors themselves account for much of this open-access journal funding.
Open access publishing has been established long enough that comparisons of open access journals against subscription journals have become performed for some journals and publishers. Many open access journals fare very well in research impact comparisons with their subscription counterparts. For example, see the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central for more specific information.
Please contact a Purdue librarian to learn more about research impacts related to open access publishing and using Purdue e-Pubs, the open access repository of the Purdue University Libraries.
Scholars have leveraged emerging Web communication tools, including wikis, blogs, online magazines, and e-journals just to name a few, to augment publication through traditional channels. The following reports and essays provide more information on these developing modes of scholarly communication and peer review:
FINDING OPEN ACCESS RESEARCH
As Open Access scholarship proliferates in repositories and journals, new tools emerge to search across these resources:
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OAIster (http://www.oaister.org/) searches across over 1,000 sources of open access scholarship (which includes both repositories and journal publishers)
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The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) provides information about thousands of open access journals. The contents of many of these journals may be searched from the DOAJ site.
There are multiple registries of open access repositories:
BioMed Central. “Official 2007 Impact Factors show excellent performance by BioMed Central journals” http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry /official_2007_impact_factors_show
Public Library of Science. “2007 Impact Factors for PLoS Journals” http://www.plos.org/cms/node/366
