Global Changes in Scholarly Communication

For more than a decade, the cost of print and electronic journals, particularly in the sciences, has increased rapidly at the same time that the amount of research being reported via published articles has grown exponentially. With academic libraries being less and less able to purchase the journals needed for their communities, the use of the term scholarly communication has evolved to illustrate the breakdown of the process of traditional scholarly publication; that is, as a means to disseminate research results, the present system of scholarly communication can no longer meet the needs of the scholarly community at large. When looking closely at the term scholarly communication, it has a somewhat broader meaning than publication, as it also includes the processes by which scholars communicate with one another as they create new knowledge and by which they measure its worth with colleagues prior to making a formal article available to the broader community. For the purposes of this paper we are dividing the scholarly ommunication process into three distinct aspects: 1) the process of conducting research, developing ideas, and communicating informally with other scholars and scientists; 2) the process of preparing, shaping, and communicating to a group of colleagues what will become formal research results; and 3) the ultimate formal product that is distributed to libraries and others in print or electronically. In addition to describing each of these aspects, we will illustrate some of the changes which are destabilizing longstanding traditions