The Future of Scholarly Communication, edited by Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb (review)

The thirteen essays in The Future of Scholarly Communication are divided into two parts called Changing Researcher Behavior and Other Players: Roles and Responsibilities. They cover most of the hot topics in scholarly communication, including open access, institutional repositories, data mining, and the future roles of libraries in the scholarly communication ecosystem. A better title might have been The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Scholarly Communication, as few of the authors really make any definite predictions; they seem to have the same uncertainty that most of us share regarding scholarly communication’s future and instead primarily identify and describe past and present trends.

While the work purports to be about the future, many of the authors spend a large number of words expressing their disdain with the present. An example is David C. Prosser’s chapter titled “Researchers and Scholarly Communications: An Evolving Interdependency.” Much of this chapter actually focuses on the past, and the author bemoans the fact that the Internet has had little impact on the essentials of journal publishing. He seems more interested in forcing change than in analyzing it or letting it occur organically. Similarly, Mark L. Brown’s chapter, “The Role of the Research Library,” is probably the most relevant one for the readers of this journal, but the chapter again focuses disproportionately on the past and present instead of the future. Brown concludes that research libraries are leaders of innovation in scholarly communication, that they serve as centers of experimentation and advocacy, that they work to provide access to all the different types of scholarly communication, and that they generally work in collaboration and as consortia to achieve economies of scale.

On the other hand, the book’s final chapter, “The Library User’s View,” presents a perspective that essentially devalues libraries as simple acquisitions departments. Author Roger Schonfeld describes how he believes science faculty experience the library: “The scientist, for whom the experience is indeed frequently seamless, has little recognition that he is using the campus library, other than in its role as a purchasing agent.” (p. 172) Fortunately, the book’s other authors do not share Schonfeld’s cynical view of academic libraries, instead affirming research libraries’ role as centers of innovation in science communication.

Of course, this work’s elephant in the room is the fact that it purports to describe the future of scholarly communication using a technology developed in the fifteenth century—the printed book. Is the future not yet here? Some of the contributors are advocates of open access, yet they allowed their work to be published as a hardcopy monograph. Moreover, most of the discussion revolves around the scholarly article; monographs are largely ignored, so it is ironic that the authors choose to disseminate their work not only in an old technology but also in a form they neglect to even describe as being a part of scholarly communication’s future.

Finally, the book is excessively centered on the United Kingdom and insufficiently treats how research libraries are organized and how research is funded in North America. Published in April 2013, this work is already becoming dated. Much of it deals with scholarly open-access publishing, a topic best covered in open-access works themselves—works published in the many new and open scholarly communication venues the book itself describes.