Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication

Book excerpt: Results of research conducted between 2007 and 2010. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their academic fields, as well as their careers, our approach focused on fine grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including career advancement, sharing, collaborating, informal and formal publishing, resource generation, and engaging with the public. The report is based on 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. We concentrated on assessing scholars' attitudes and needs as both producers and users of research results.