Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know®

by Rick Anderson

The internet has transformed the ways in which scholars and scientists share their findings with each other and the world, creating a scholarly communication environment that is both more complex and more effective than it was just a few years earlier. Scholarly communication itself has become an umbrella term for the increasingly complex ecosystem of publications, platforms, and tools that scholars, scientists, and researchers use to share their work with each other and with other interested readers.

Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) offers an accessible overview of the current landscape, examining the state of affairs in the worlds of journal and book publishing, copyright law, emerging access models, digital archiving, university presses, metadata, and much more. Anderson discusses many of the problems that arise due to conflicts between the various values and interests at play within these systems: values that include the public good, academic freedom, the advancement of science, and the efficient use of limited resources. The implications of these issues extend far beyond academia.

Organized in an easy-to-use question-and-answer format, this book provides a lively and helpful summary of some of the most important issues and developments in the world of scholarly communication -- a world that affects our everyday lives far more than we may realize.

Genres: Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

Published June 4, 2018

About the author

A creative thinker on topics related to library collections and scholarly publishing, Rick Anderson does not back away from controversy. “Whenever we, as members of an organization like a library, are forced to choose between good things, we may start by trying to figure out some way to have both things,” he writes in the preface to “Libraries, Leadership, and Scholarly Communication: Essays by Rick Anderson,” his new book. “But in many cases, that will turn out to be impossible and we’ll have to decide which good thing is going to take priority over the other. We can’t make that decision without invoking values, and the moment we start invoking values is when the conversation can take a really difficult and interesting turn.”

Reviews

[Rachel]

I thought that I knew a little about scholarly communication because I'm constantly searching for and citing articles in my work as Wikipedian-in-Residence at the BYU library, but the researcher's perspective is only a small part of the workflows and cashflows behind how academics write for publishers who then sell their work to libraries. I feel like this book filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but it didn't fill them in completely because I still have a lot of questions about topics that were mentioned in the book.

Anderson's writing style is conversational, which was really helpful to me because about half the time I read something about scholarly communications, my brain shuts off about three paragraphs in. However, sometimes the causal tone was painful because it still wasn't simple enough for me. I still don't understand if copyleft is the same as software cracking, what the difference between a research library and an academic library is, or why journals are so expensive if neither the author, the peer reviewer, the peer review coordinator, nor the editor gets paid. I mean, maintaining a website and permalinks to articles does take a non-trivial amount of labor, but it's not a ton. Is it because of the Big Deal stuff? Are publishers just sitting around making money off of all that (university-subsidized) labor?

I could not BELIEVE that one of the reasons that the Espresso Book Machine wasn't more popular because the company that organizes their metadata couldn't get their act together to make their database searchable. I had wondered what happened to those. Another thing that surprised me is that DOIs are an altmetric and are STILL used to track um, something. Like how often an article is linked to the "reach and impact" (189) of articles? For funding agencies.

I found the question-and-answer format incredibly artificial. As a reader, I put myself in the questioner's shoes, but the questions often abruptly shifted topic, referred to library inside baseball, and sometimes felt like an obviously leading question ("What is wrong with 'toll access'?" (198); "What is the 'copyleft' movement and what are its implications for scholarly communication?" (104)). This book could have benefitted from fewer parenthetical asides and better organization, both within chapters and by organizing chapters into larger parts. I'm salty that most of the references were bare URLs. Linkrot happens quickly and I bet a third of them don't even work anymore.

Okay, enough harping. The chapter on the role of the library was really good when it started talking about demand-driven acquisition and explaining the way the library's role in providing access to research has changed recently. Since vendors of electronic material are responsible for their upkeep and the library's access to it, the library-vendor relationship has to be continual (whereas in the past, libraries would buy stuff, house it themselves, and that could be the end of a transaction). That was something I hadn't really thought of before.

I was also very interested in the chapter on Google books and Hathitrust. I didn't realize that when Google was doing their initial mass-scans that they gave copies of the scans to the book-donating/lending institutions. That's genius. Google books got sued by publishers for violating copyright, but they argued that making digital, text-searchable versions was a “transformative use”. It made me wonder/worry if other text-searchable digitization projects could argue the same thing and then charge a bunch of money for their transformative use.

I would have liked the book to get more into the controversies surrounding issues. The section on university presses alluded to an argument against university presses being subsumed into academic libraries, but then didn’t even summarize the argument! I guess that’s a limitation of an introductory book. Full disclosure: Anderson is the “big boss man” (as the boomers in the office say) at the library I work at. Maybe that explains why I’m too chicken to give it a star rating. Look, some parts were five stars and some were not. And if you made it this far, congrats, you are one of my die-hard review fans!

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to the topic.

[Nikki Miskey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of scholarly communications, though I thought it paid more attention to acquisitions than needed. But overall good information, and I'd recommend for those new to the field.