{"id":89,"date":"2015-07-06T14:03:23","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T18:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ultraslavonic.info\/blog\/?p=89"},"modified":"2016-12-14T15:49:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T21:49:26","slug":"is-there-a-better-term-for-scholarly-communication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultraslavonic.info\/blog\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Is there a better term for “scholarly communication”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not the first to be frustrated with the term “scholarly communication”. In brief, here are the problems that folks have identified:<\/p>\n

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  1. Pretty much everything that scholars do is communicate<\/em>, so on the face of it, this phrase has a very wide scope. (I first heard this from Paul Courant<\/a>.) However, it is usually used only in reference to communication between scholars, not between scholars and students or the public.<\/li>\n
  2. The “crisis in scholarly communication” or “scholarly communication crisis” refers to superinflationary increases in the costs of subscriptions\u00a0to licensed resources (especially journals from the major commercial publishers) and loss of leverage against “big deal” journal bundles from these publishers. This is\u00a0only indirectly related to choices that scholars make in the way\u00a0that they\u00a0communicate with each other. A major factor in this, though, is that\u00a0the superinflationary increases in costs are largely attributable to the fact that the authors and readers of these publications do not feel the cost pressures and therefore are unlikely to change their behavior in response. For most scholars, a more real crisis the “monograph crisis”:\u00a0a perceived lack of acceptable publishing venues for new scholars, especially for first monographs, that will be acceptable to promotion & tenure committees.<\/li>\n
  3. Librarians often use “scholarly communication” as short for “outreach related to scholarly communication”,\u00a0grouping together various activities related to\u00a0outreach to scholars on author rights, open access, the serials crisis, promoting your work to your peers, and maybe also the exploration of digitally-native forms of publishing. While these certainly have to do with how scholars communicate with each other, none of these is\u00a0the same as the means\u00a0or practice of communication between scholars.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    In short, we’ve lumped together<\/a> various things affecting us or which we do<\/a>\u00a0under a heading that is imprecise and too expansive to have a clear\u00a0meaning to the folks (scholars) we are trying to reach out to. To be clear, I don’t mind when this is done internally in libraries<\/strong>: we all need shorthand so we can get on with our work.\u00a0Still,\u00a0how can we describe these activities more precisely\u00a0to those we’re trying to reach? <\/strong>I’ve asked on scholcomm<\/a> and on Twitter<\/a>, and here are some ideas suggested by others\u00a0(which I’ve unilaterally grouped\u00a0according to the three problems above), mixed in with a few of my own:<\/p>\n

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    1. For just communication between scholars:\n