Metadata and Why It Matters

What is metadata? Literally, the word “metadata” means “data about data,” and it refers to a huge variety of information types. A caption printed under a photograph is an example of metadata; so are the catalog record for a library book, a citation to...

What Is the Role of the Library?

What do we mean when we say “libraries”? Obviously, there are many different kinds of libraries with a variety of missions: Public libraries, corporate libraries, hospital libraries, subscription libraries, school libraries, and academic libraries all exist to do subtly but significantly different things. Since this...

What Is Scholarly Publishing and How Does It Work?

What is the difference between scholarly communication and scholarly publishing? As discussed in Chapter 2, scholars communicate with each other in a wide variety of ways, all of which exist on a spectrum of formality. At the informal end of the spectrum are the conversations...

Metrics and Altmetrics

How is quality defined and measured in the world of scholarly publishing? The concept of scholarly quality is a complicated one because it has multiple dimensions that apply in different ways depending on the type of publication in question and the context in which it...

What Is the Role of Copyright?

Why do we have copyright law? Although there have been various laws throughout history designed to regulate publishing, modern copyright law has its clearest roots in the Statute of Anne, established in England in 1709. This act of Parliament was intended to stop “Printers, Booksellers,...

Problems and Controversies in Scholarly Communication

What is the “serials crisis”? For the past several decades, librarians and other observers and participants in the scholarly communication ecosystem have been expressing alarm over the degree to which annual price increases for scholarly journals—especially those in the STM disciplines—tend to outstrip library budget...

Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges

What is “open access”? Open access (OA) has to do with making access to scholarly content freely available to all. As a term, it is often used in opposition to “toll access,” which refers to the prevailing system in scholarly communication now—one whereby people gain...

Introduction

Scholarly communication may seem, quite reasonably, like a narrow and specialized area of inquiry, one that most people neither need nor probably want to know very much about. So perhaps we should begin this book with what might be the most obvious question of all:...

The Future of Scholarly Communication

The obvious question for us to address in this final chapter is a deceptively simple-sounding one: What will the future of scholarly communication look like? But we should probably break that question into more manageable chunks.

Needs and Practices in STM and HSS

What do STM and HSS stand for? STM stands for “scientific, technical, and medical,” and the acronym has basically come to be used as a shorthand reference to what many call the “hard” sciences—those that produce findings based on controlled laboratory practice, concrete experimentation, and...