Electronic resources and institutional repositories in informal scholarly
communication and publishing
Introduction
Electronic publishing has challenged and affected the traditional scholarly communication system and is changing our notions of what scholarly publishing means by modifying the way researchers produce, communicate and access information. Over the past few years this has had important implications for both the formal and informal communication and publishing systems.
One of the most important aspects has been the creation and publication of
digital scholarly materials on the Internet by members of the academic community.
This in turn has led to a growth in the amount of electronic resources available
online. Universities have begun to develop and evaluate ways to manage, disseminate,
detect and access this increasingly copious amount of material. In recent
years, scholarly repositories have become an important tool for electronic
resource management and publication. Although there are different types,
they all share the underlying motivation of improving access to digital materials
in order to aid their discovery and use by other scholars. It is therefore
increasingly important to understand the use of these repositories and to
find appropriate methodologies to detect and evaluate their impact. It is
important to understand if these electronic resources are being used and
to what extent are they important within the scholarly communication process.
In particular it is important to study the resources found within repositories
that are outside the framework of the traditional scholarly publishing, as
there is a limited understanding of their function and impact within the
scholarly communication system. In the formal publishing arena there has
been extensive research regarding the motivation and mechanisms that lead
academics to communicate and publish the results from their research. In
the case of electronic resources, which are outside the formal framework,
there has been little research into the motivations for their creation and
publication. As more research is published online it would be important to
enquire into certain sociological aspects, including reward systems and prestige,
to further understand researcher’s communicative behaviour.
Additionally the traditional divisions of formal and informal scholarly communication
and publishing are being altered and blurred with the introduction of networked
computers and in particular the web. Many discussions surrounding electronic
publishing tend to tacitly assume that these channels are unaltered, by taking
what is normal in the print world and applying the same criteria to the electronic
world (Kircz 2002). However, it is quite clear that there are implications
and these should be discussed in order to better understand the current state
of electronic publishing and communication, as well as their future.
In addition, recent initiatives such as e-Science infrastructure are examining
not only the technical aspects of information and technological systems,
but also the way that information is produced, manipulated, exchanged, disseminated
and used by researchers. New and more
powerful technologies require information and research results in a more
flexible format that will allow for the reuse of data for different purposes.
These types of innovations will most likely make use of diverse electronic
resources and will result in the further blurring of the boundaries between
formal electronic publishing, grey literature and other types of electronic
resources. It seems almost inevitable that electronic publishing will continue
to change and to challenge our notions of publication and the scholarly communication
process in general. It is therefore, important to provide further insight
into the ways that the electronic resources are produced and used, in order
to better understand what implications they may have for the near future
of scholarly communication and publishing.
