Need to Know Now: Scholarly Communication Today Prof. Monica Berger, Library PDAC, NYC College of TechnologyMonica Berger Nov. 17, 2005

Program overview Scholarly communication in general What is scholarly communication? How has it changed? Interdisciplinary, electronic Four major tools for scholarly communication in historical order

Program overview 1. Listservs (informal) = -based communication 2. Ejournals & Open Access journals (formal: often peer-reviewed) different modes of access, complexity of definition of Open Access Licensed vs. “free” ejournals Preprints/Postprints Hybrid open access journals: not all content available

Program overview 3. Digital libraries (hybrid content, not always peer-reviewed) Collections of content, often by subject, can be mixed media 4. Blogs (informal) Increasingly utilized by scholars, still new

What is Scholarly Communication? Definition: generally understood to mean publication of research articles in scholarly journals (and possibly monographs) but there are many other forums for scholarly communication

Speed of Scholarly Communication Then: 1. Books and journals, conference papers, newsletters Internet age (late 1980s -) 1. All of the above plus 2. Listservs for immediate electronic discussion “ is the killer ap”(1990s - ) 1. All of the above plus 2. becomes ubiquitous 3. Push technology hot in mid-1990s but didn’t come to fruition 4. WWW used for content but not for fast communication The Hybrid age ( ) 1. All of the above plus 2. Blogs, wikis and other emerging technologies

Finding the content Predigital age (before mid-1980s): print indexes, card catalog Early digital age (early 1990s, pre-WWW) All of the above plus electronic indexes, online catalog Middle digital age (mid-late 1990s, pre-Google) All of the above (excluding card catalog) plus Internet search engines (would retrieve only free WWW content) Hybrid environment (2004- ) All of the above (excluding card catalog) plus hybrid gateways to content both free and licensed including GooglePrint, GoogleScholar, Digital Libraries)

Cyclical nature of scholarship The next two charts shows the scientific publication cycle and give some time lines... Conception of research idea, secondary research and other more informal development of idea, grant proposal Conference presentation, preprint of article Possible “Gray literature” report publication Peer-reviewed article is published Research is included in monographs May disseminate to popular media/textbooks Influence other scholars, new research

Listservs/electronic discussion groups Listservs and listproc are electronic discussion groups Features: Web interface for some archives for most (some web) can suspend messages when on vacation daily digest some moderated not always open to all

Listservs/electronic discussion groups List = the subscribers Server = the computer managing the and the commands

Listservs/electronic discussion groups Command to SERVER (subscribe) Send message to Text = SUBSCRIBE SERIALIST MONICA BERGER Message to LIST (people): Send message to

Search on “biology”

Licensed Ejournals ($) Our library has 28,000 online periodicals Aggregate databases, e.g. Ebsco = subject to flux in terms of titles Ejournal collections tend to be stable, have deep archival back files Project Muse JSTOR American Chemical Society Ejournals Duke University Press Browse or search New Issue/Table of Contents alerting for specific journals

Full access/always free

History dissertations published as ebooks; not free

Finding, managing, creating blogs Finding blogs Google Blogsearch recommended to identify blogsBlogsearch Managing blogs Blogarithm generates “blogmail” when blogs are updated (not very efficient) Blogarithm Bloglines: one-stop reading + searching, subscribing to blogs, can get content by keyword (maybe a better solution) Bloglines RSS (Really Simple Syndication): format for syndicating news and personal weblogs: content pushed to a RSS reader. Can get content by keywords. Many RSS readers. I have used Pluck, software I downloaded from CNETCNET Creating a blog Blogger most popular Blogger

Bibliography Available separately on the library’s website