Scholarly communication?
I recently surveyed faculty and grad students in the English and Comp Lit Departments here at UCLA to see what terminology would get them to click on a web link if they wanted information pertaining to copyright, intellectual property, dissemination of research, academic publishing, and so on. Here in the library, we lump all this stuff under the heading “scholarly communication.” But in the survey, “scholarly communication” was roundly rejected by all respondents. Not much of a surprise there. Here are the results I got:
A. creating and using scholarship (or scholarly output) – 6%
B. scholarly communication - 0
C. copyright and IP issues – 72%
D. Other, please specify – 22% (”Publishing and Intellectual Property” or “Issues in Scholarly Publishing”; “Electronic Scholarship” or “Virtual Academic Publishing Issues”; “Copyright, Publication, and Intellectual Property Issues”; “Publishing Resources and Services”)
We will definitely use this feedback to inform the web resources we are in the process of designing for our campus community. The “we” here refers to the Scholarly Communication Steering Committee of the UCLA Library, of which I am a member.
The library world is not likely to jettison the term “scholarly communication” anytime soon. That said, important and relevant resources are springing up everywhere, so scholars should be able to find information they need regarding copyright, intellectual property, dissemination of research, academic publishing, etc., as long as they know where to look for it. One great resource of which I recently became aware is CreateChange.org, a campaign spearheaded by The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Clearly, scholars need help when negotiating author agreements with publishers or when deciding what qualifies as fair use in the classroom, but the issues of scholarly communication go beyond these. Traditional modes of scholarly communication—including but not limited to book and journal publication—need to transform to accommodate new modes of scholarship and to ensure that this scholarship is accessible to as many scholars as possible in perpetuity. More than anything, there needs to be a shift in the culture of scholarship and publishing in higher education and this is where CreateChange.org comes in.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
This is really good input, Marta. Interesting that Scholarly Communication as a term we are using to communicate with faculty is not recognized by them. Perhaps this explains low turnout to the scholarly communication workshops. I also wonder if this would differ in the Sciences? I’d actually like to ask the same question to the Public Policy faculty; then we’d have two North Campus depts - one in humanities and one in social sciences.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Do try asking the Public Policy faculty. I just emailed my faculty and then I compiled their responses in Doodle, which made it really easy to track. There may well be differences among disciplines. With the prominence of efforts like the new NIH open access publishing guidelines, folks in the sciences may be more likely to have run across information labeled “scholarly communication.” Let me know what you find out!
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Did you use zoomerang? If so, may I just duplicate the survey?
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
No, nothing so formal–it was really just a quick straw poll. I will forward you the email I sent out.