Definitions

What, exactly, is meant by scholarly communications, and by scholarly publishing?

According to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL):

The bold text above is my (this author’s) own emphasis. It’s one of the most essential components of scholarly communication, and is important to keep in mind throughout this course, as we will uncover tension between the “public good” nature of scholarly communications and the way in which the system operates within capitalist societies.

Now let’s turn to another definition:

Scholarly communications is a large, umbrella term for the myriad ways in which faculty scholars, academics, scientists, and researchers create and share new knowledge. Scholarly publishing is a narrower term that specifically describes the peer-reviewed, refereed, scholarly publication process. The relationship between scholarly communications and scholarly publishing looks something like this:

“Other channels” could be any other ways that academics and scholars communicate their work, such as conferences, blogs, social media such as Twitter, electronic listservs, institutional or disciplinary repositories, and more. As new technologies emerge, and scholarly culture changes, so do these other channels. This course focuses primarily on scholarly publishing, specifically scholarly journal publishing, although in order to understand it, we will also include some contextual information about other channels and how they relate to scholarly publishing.

Players and Their Roles

What happens throughout the scholarly publishing process? Who are the people participating, and what do each of them do?

Here is a basic illustration of the key parts of the process:

• Faculty & Student Authors, Scholars, Researchers, Scientists are the content creators. They conduct research, review the literature, collect data, and make discoveries. They package their findings by writing scholarly articles and hope to publish them in scholarly journals specific to their discipline. (In the diagram above, their work is symbolized by the red “Research, Data Collection & Analysis” icon and the green “Authoring” icon.)
• Editors of scholarly journals receive an author’s submission and oversee the peer review process, often communicating with both authors and peer reviewers. (Note the purple “Peer Review” icon.)
• Peer Reviewers are other experts in the author’s field. They perform a close reading of the article and make a recommendation to the editor as to whether or not the article should be accepted for publication — and whether or not acceptance is contingent on the author making revisions to the work. In most cases, in an effort to reduce the possibility of bias or retaliation, the identity of the author is not made known to the peer reviewers, and the identities of the peer reviewers is not made known to the author. This is called double blind peer review. The number of peer reviewers and their responsibilities vary according to the each journal’s unique policies. Typically, after an article undergoes peer review, it is sent back to the author with (Note the purple “Peer Review” icon.)
• Publishers are organizations that manage the publication process. This includes things like having the author sign a contract outlining the publisher’s copyright terms, performing layout and formatting for the article to appear in the journal, and assigning metadata (such as a DOI, or Digital Object Identifer) to the article. Publishers can vary in size, from large operations with numerous employees to small units with only a few people. They may be commercial, for-profit companies; academic presses based at universities; or not-for-profit entities. Academic libraries are increasingly serving as publishers as well. (See the blue “Publication” icon.)
• Academic Libraries collect and provide access to the finished product: the scholarly journal articles. They pay for subscriptions to databases and indexes so that their students, faculty, and staff can find the articles, and for subscriptions to the journals so that they can read the articles. They teach their campus community how to locate, access, evaluate, cite, and incorporate the articles into their own research and scholarly projects. They advocate for reform, innovation, and transparency within scholarly communications in order to promote a more equitable and sustainable system. (Refer to the orange “Discovery & Dissemination” icon.)
• Readers are students, faculty, scholars, researchers, scientists, and anyone else who reads and/or uses the published article. They typically discover and access the article through their academic library. They may, in turn, become authors themselves and incorporate the information from the article into their own work, and the cycle continues.

Although the diagram above shows one-way arrows from one stage to another, the process is rarely linear. Rather, scholarly publishing is a complex, nuanced process with back-and-forth movement throughout, and the path (and timeline) to publication for one article might look very different for another. But the parts and players shown above are usually involved in one form or another. Understanding this model lays the foundation for the rest of this course.