Topic: Scholarly communication
Issue Brief
March 6, 2014
Opening the Textbook
New Opportunities for Libraries and Publishers?
What solutions might we find within our community to solve the problem of rising textbook prices? In this issue brief, Nancy Maron, Ithaka S+R’s program director for sustainability and scholarly communications, looks at recent trends in textbook publishing and suggests that collaborations between university presses and academic libraries might yield a new breed of textbook more aligned to the needs of faculty and students.
Blog Post
December 10, 2013
Stop the Presses
Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future?
Stop the Presses: Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future? Can we expect the print monograph to disappear anytime soon? While the road to a fully digital future for scholarly monographs is not clearly in sight, the widespread availability of ebooks is already transforming researchers’ reading habits. As librarians and publishers consider their options, they must take into account how the usage behavior of academics is evolving. In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores the challenges and possibilities if…
Issue Brief
December 10, 2013
Stop the Presses
Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future?
Can we expect the print monograph to disappear anytime soon? While the road to a fully digital future for scholarly monographs is not clearly in sight, the widespread availability of ebooks is already transforming researchers' reading habits. As librarians and publishers consider their options, they must take into account how the usage behavior of academics is evolving. In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores the challenges and possibilities if we "Stop the Presses."
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Searching for Sustainability
Strategies from Eight Digitized Special Collections
This report aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing libraries and cultural heritage organizations: how to move their special collections into the 21st century through digitization while developing successful strategies to make sure those collections remain accessible and relevant over time. Through a cooperative agreement as part of the National Leadership Grants Program, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in partnership with Ithaka S+R, to undertake in-depth case studies…
Issue Brief
August 29, 2013
The Space Between
The well-known Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey expanded beyond US faculty members in 2012 to include academics in the UK. We now have a fascinating window for assessing a variety of aspects of national higher education systems, affording us the opportunity to examine their comparative positioning and to consider a variety of possible policy interventions.
Blog Post
July 30, 2013
Notes from the field: Digital Humanities 2013
On July 15 I participated in the Digital Humanities 2013, an international conference hosted by Ken Price, Kay Walter, and their colleagues at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. The four-day conference featured hundreds of compelling papers and posters about digital humanities theory, practice, projects, and tools. The day before the conference, I hosted a half-day workshop for eighteen digital project leaders seeking to develop sustainability plans. We had a diverse and engaged group…
Research Report
May 14, 2013
Ithaka S+R | Jisc | RLUK
UK Survey of Academics 2012
The UK Survey of Academics 2012, conducted by Ithaka S+R, Jisc, and Research Libraries UK (RLUK), examines the attitudes and behaviours of academics at higher education institutions across the United Kingdom. Our objective is to provide the entire sector, including universities, learned societies, scholarly publishers, and especially academic libraries, with timely findings and analysis that help them plan for the future. The Survey of Academics covers broadly the population of academics across the UK, as well as the opportunity to look…
Research Report
April 8, 2013
US Faculty Survey 2012
The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has focused since its inception on capturing an accurate picture of faculty members' practices, attitudes, and needs. In the fifth triennial cycle, fielded in fall 2012, the survey focused on research and teaching practices broadly, as well as the dissemination, collecting, discovery, and access of research and teaching materials. Findings from this cycle of the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey will provide colleges and universities, libraries, learned societies, and academic publishers with insight into…
Research Report
February 25, 2013
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists
In this report, we present the results of Ithaka S+R’s study of the scholarly practices of academic chemists. This study, funded by Jisc, presents information meant to empower research support providers in their work with chemists. The report covers themes such as data management, research collaboration, library use, discovery, publication practices, and research funding. The report describes the findings of our investigation into academic chemists’ research habits and research support needs. The digital availability of scholarly literature has transformed chemists’…
Blog Post
February 12, 2013
New Ithaka S+R Research Support Services Project in Art History
This winter, as part of the Research Support Services program, Ithaka S+R is launching a new investigation of researcher practices and support services needs in the field of art history. Our goal is to examine the evolving needs of researchers on a field-specific basis in order to best understand how libraries and other information services providers meet these needs. We are grateful to the Getty Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their joint funding of this project. Our…
Research Report
December 7, 2012
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians
This study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, uncovers the needs of today’s historians and provides guidance for how research support providers can better serve them. We explore areas such as content discovery, information management, scholarly analysis, collaboration, library use, the writing process, professional interactions, and publication, among others. Our interviews of faculty and graduate students reveal history as a field in transition. It is characterized by a vast expansion of new sources, widely adopted research practices and…
Blog Post
December 4, 2012
Art Books and eBooks
A Difficult Conversation?
In late September, I participated in “Art Books & Ebooks: A Difficult Conversation?” an event hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, organized by Ross Day, Collections Development Librarian at the Met, and focused on the future of books, e-books, and museum publishing in a digital age. Participants reflected on the changing environment for publishing and collections development and management, focusing on how monographs in the field of art and art history fit into or are…
Blog Post
November 20, 2012
Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2012
Videos Now Available
ITHAKA hosted our annual Sustainable Scholarship Conference in October, bringing together librarians, publishers, scholarly society leaders, and a variety of others interested in how higher education is changing as a result of new technologies. This year’s theme was “The Question of Quality: New Forms of Grading, Credentialing, and Peer Review in the Digital World.” Videos of the presentations are now available online. Here are some highlights: Keynote: Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA, focused on some of the key…
Blog Post
June 5, 2012
ORCID and Identity Management Systems
Nature News & Comment recently published an article that focused on some of the ways that the scholarly community could benefit from the creation of a unified identity system for researchers. Researcher disambiguation might be able to simplify the process of applying for grants and submitting papers for publication. It also opens up a whole range of possibilities with regard to measuring scholarly productivity, tracking new forms of scholarship, and using data to learn more about scholarly communications.
Research Report
October 6, 2011
University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit 2011
Reimagining the Value Proposition
When the original case study was published in 2009, the staff of the BOPCRIS Digitization Centre at the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library had recently completed three large scale, grant funded digitization projects and was exploring different means of ensuring access to the digital content they had created. An early experiment with local hosting had shown that the Library was unprepared to deal with the on-going costs of maintaining these resources, and they turned to external content providers—ProQuest and JSTOR—for…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) 2011
How a Specialised Resource Begins to Address a Wider Audience
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) provides an example of a specialized resource which draws on multiple revenue streams for its sustainability model. This collection of digitized ancient Greek texts is considered essential for scholars of the classics, which has allowed the project to successfully implement a fee for access despite appealing to a relatively small primary audience. In addition to subscription fees from institutions and individuals, income from an endowment and funding from the University of California, Irvine (where it…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The National Archives (TNA) 2011
Enhancing the Value of Content through Selection and Curation
In 2008 we examined the activities of the Licensed Internet Associates program (LIA), a business operation within The National Archives (TNA) that licenses TNA’s holdings to commercial entities. Beyond providing direct revenue to TNA in the form of royalty income, the LIA program has played a major role in the rapid digitization of TNA’s documents at an extremely low cost, outsourcing the function to its licensing partners. In the face of a projected 25 percent cut in government funding over…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
DigiZeitschriften 2011
A Niche Project at a Crossroads
DigiZeitschriften, a collection of digitized German language scholarly journals, has continued to successfully support its operations and generate a surplus through a combination of its subscription model and low cost base, thanks to its 14 partner libraries, which help to curate the content and seek grant funding as needed. Since we profiled this project in 2009, its website has been revamped, and Google and other search engines are now allowed to crawl some content for the first time. And yet…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Electronic Enlightenment (EE) 2011
Outreach or Outsource? The Benefits and Challenges of Partnership, Case Study Update 2011
In 2008 the Electronic Enlightenment launched efforts to transition to an institutional subscription model, part of its long-term plan for sustaining itself beyond the period of grant funding. Now housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and working with Oxford University Press as its sales, marketing and distribution partner, Electronic Enlightenment is still in the process of building its subscriber base, a task made more challenging by the impact of the recession on library budgets. This update reports on the challenges EE…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2011
Growing an Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model
The original case study in 2009 explored Hindawi’s transition from a subscription-based journal operation to an all open access publisher, with the bulk of revenues derived from fees from authors rather than subscription charges. Because the company’s growth depends on the number of articles published each year, the company changed its focus from marketing to end users to developing new products, entering into partnerships with societies and other publishers, and creating a publishing experience for authors and editors that would…