Perspective Architecting the Future of Research Communication: Building the Models and Analytics for an Open Access Future

We live in an exciting time. There are huge opportunities starting to open up for more effective research communication. The massive progress towards Open Access [1] is a core part of this. At the same time, the tools we have to display, manipulate, and interact with this content have become not just incredibly powerful, but easier to use. And as the web in general provides new kinds of services, new ways of communicating, telling sto-ries, and manipulating data there is a profound cultural shift occurring as our expectations of what should be possible, indeed what should be easy, grow. But as this vista opens up, we also have to make choices. The possibilities are multi-plying but where should we focus our attention? More particularly, in a world of limited research resources where are the most important opportunities for greater efficiency? The Open Access movement has changed from a small community advocating for change, with successes in specific disciplines, to the centre of research policy making. But as we move into implementation, disagreements on details and priorities come to the surface. These choices and the attendant dis-agreements are important and will occupy our attention for the next few years. But we also need to look beyond them. We need to ask ourselves what our overall priorities are for research and research communication. And we need a frame-work that we can use to critique the opportunities and costs that will arise as we look to extend the principles of Open Access from articles to books, grey litera-ture, data, and materials, indeed to all the outputs of research. Increasingly research-ers, institutions, and funders will be asking the question: with these resources for communication, how do I maximize the value of this research? Understanding how to answer these questions is possibly the core challenge for the next decade of scholarly communications. To meet this challenge we will need better frameworks to understand how scholarly communica-tion works in a networked environment