The Reshaping Scholarly Communication website (http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu), an information resource especially for UC faculty on the facts and issues surrounding scholarly publishing, has been revised and updated. The website was originally the output of the Office of Scholarly Communication, which is now inoperative, so it is now the responsibility of the UC libraries’ Scholarly Communication Officers’ (SCO) group, in consultation with the Academic Senate’s University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC). CDL hosts the site. The update has cleared away out-dated material (although reports of historical interest remain), and streamlined and added more current content. The site will be maintained and updated more regularly, thanks to the SCOs. Many thanks go to those who helped out with the site revision, including the Scholarly Communication Officers, the Reshaping Scholarly Communication Website Review Task Force (Bonnie Tijerina, Elise Proulx, Margaret Phillips, and Janice Contini), and the CDL Web Production Team.

For more information about the UC libraries’ Scholarly Communication Officers’ (SCO) group, see http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sco/.

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication.

The center’s final report on this multi-year research project, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines (available at http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc), brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

“Our premise has always been that disciplinary conventions matter and that social realities (and individual personality) will dictate how new practices, including those under the rubric of Web 2.0 or cyberinfrastructure, are adopted by scholars,” says Principal Investigator and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project, Diane Harley, Ph.D. “That is, the academic values embodied in disciplinary cultures, as well as the interests of individual players, have to be considered when envisioning new schemata for the communication of scholarship at its various stages.”

The report’s executive summary concludes that scholarly communication traditions, “which rely heavily on various forms of peer review, may override the perceived ‘opportunities’ afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category.”

In addition, the report targets five key topics in the current scholarly communication system that require attention: the development of more nuanced tenure and promotion process; a reexamination of peer review; competitive high quality and affordable journals and monograph publishing platforms; new models of publication that can accommodate material of varied length, as well as rich media and embedded links to data; and support for managing and preserving new research methods and products.

Visit http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc to download or view the full report.