Scholarly Communication   Tags: author's rights, collaboration, copyright, open access, peer review, scholarly communication, self-archiving  

Scholarly communication is the process by which scholars create, evaluate, and share the results of their research and creative work. In recent years, traditional forms of scholarly communication have become less economically sustainable as access restrictions and the high price of journals present barriers to maintaining an open and cost-effective system. Today, with common acceptance of digital publishing, scholarly communication concerns have broadened beyond journal costs to include issues affecting content creation and disseminaton. Below, we introduce some of the most prominent issues in scholarly communication today.

The United States Copyright Office defines copyright as "a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of 'original works of authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works."  Understanding copyright is not easy, and it is even more complicated in the digital age. In scholarly communication, copyright is further complicated by issues such as the state of corporate scholarly publishing, tenure promotion and review process, and the alternatives to traditional copyright afforded by the internet and digital technology. [ more ]

Provided it meets basic thresholds for originality, as soon as you begin creating a work in any fixed medium (including an electronic medium), the work is copyrighted and no other actions are necessary for it to be protected. But, when you sign a contract to publish that work, you may be asked to transfer your copyright. Many academic publishers require that authors sign away the rights to their work, although this doesn't always have to be the case. Authors can retain the rights to their work in several ways: by using Creative Commons license, by publishing in open access journals, or by negotiating an author's addendum to the traditional scholarly publishing contract. [ more ]

Open access to scholarly literature and research, as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, means "its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." [ more ]

Self-archiving is a strategy used by authors to make their scholarly works available on the open web--to provide open access. In this context, the contents are usually journal articles, conference or technical reports, theses and dissertations, or data sets. A scholarly work is self-archived if it is posted to a personal or professional web site, deposited in an institutional repository, or contributed by the author to a disciplinary archive such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), arXiv, or PubMed Central.  [ more ]

Peer review is a process of self-regulation and a process of evaluation by scholars involving qualified individuals within the relevant field of study. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility. In academia, peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. There exist many forms of peer review, and new models, such as open peer review, are also beginning to emerge. Peer review is highly connected to the promotion and tenure process and, thus, often involves a number of delicate and important issues. [ more ]

Digital technology has given rise to unprecendented levels and types of scholarly collaboration, culminating in such diverse new forms as e-science and the digital humanities. Today, every stage of the scholarly process—from research and authoring, to peer-review and publishing—can now be done collaboratively online, but what are the best tools to be using? In this section, we introduce some of the best digital tools that enable better and stronger modes of scholarly collaboration. [ more ]