ARL, Ithaka “Field Study” Finds New Scholarly Models Are Embraced 

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/11/2008 11:01:00 AM

• "Field study" approach
• Digital resources pervasive across all disciplines
• Innovation "blurring" the lines between resources?

It’s been a year of significant steps in how we think about scholarly communication, from passage of the NIH public access policy to Harvard’s open access mandate and, recently, the deal between publishers and Google to settle their book-scanning lawsuit. But are faculty members really embracing new models of scholarly communication? According to a report issued this week by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), carried out by Ithaka, the answer appears to be yes. “For those who believe scholars and researchers are unwilling to change their practices of sharing new knowledge,” wrote ARL scholarly communication director Karla Hahn, “this work offers significant evidence to the contrary.”

The report, “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication,” was conceptual­ized as a “field study,” based on conversations, designed to “look squarely at new forms of scholarship and scholarly works and consider them in their own lights.” While the approach was not “statistically” meaningful, it revealed a rich cross-section of what innovation in digital scholarly resources looks like today. Among the principal types of digital scholarly resources identified: e-only journals; reviews; preprints and working papers; encyclopedias; dictionaries and annotated content; blogs and discussion forums; and professional and scholarly hubs.

In addition to better understanding researchers’ scholarly communication needs, the report also gathered a list of “exemplary” resources, released with the report, which offers a vivid example the changing landscape of scholarly com­munication. While ARL officials acknowledge the hundreds of faculty members who spoke with librarians for the study may not be “entirely representa­tive of their communities,” the study found that “established scholars and relative novices” were both using and contributing to new kinds of works in their field. Among the study’s findings: 

• Evidence that innovative digital resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/technical/medical subject areas.
• Almost every resource cited by faculty operates under some form of peer review or editorial oversight.
• Some the resources with greatest impact are those that have been around a long while.
• Many digital publications are capable of running on relatively small budgets and are tailored to small, niche audiences.
• Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types.
• Projects of all sizes, especially open access sites and publications, employ a range of support strategies in the search for financial sustainability.

The latest report, which comes after an enlightening study on the academic library’s role in publishing released this spring, adds to a body of valuable research to help librarians better grasp the new world of scholarship they must now support—a new environment, ARL notes, that comes with an increasingly vexing problem. “The decentralized distribution of these new model works can make it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number,” Hahn explained in her summary. “By closely examining the diverse examples collected for the study, the authors have taken a major step toward describing a largely unexplored ecosystem, one that we now know occurs across a wide range of disciplines.”

In addition, the “field study” concept gave librarians and researchers an opportunity to converse directly with faculty. “Initiating several hundred of these conversations on campuses in the U.S. and Canada,” Hahn wrote, “was a substantial study outcome in its own right.”   

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