Scholarly Communication

Scholarly communication is a term used to describe the ways in which researchers publish and disseminate the outcomes of their research to make them available to their colleagues, peers, the wider academic and education community and beyond. Scholarly communication can be thought of as the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to research. It was once thought of simply as another way to describe the process of publishing a research monograph or an article in an academic journal, but recent developments have meant that the term is now used to signal a number of issues. These include author rights & copyright, open access, institutional repositories and preservation.

The traditional method of scholarly communication is by writing up the findings of research in to an article to be published in an academic journal or by publishing a book, book chapter or conference paper.

The term 'Scholarly Communication' is believed to have been in use for over 30 years, but recent developments (primarily the way that we disseminate and access information in the age of the internet) have meant that new methods of scholarly communication have come into being. The 'scholarly communications crisis' (also known as 'the journals crisis') has also been a driver supporting a move towards open access, with new options being born, such as publishing in subscription-free peer-reviewed open access journals, or disseminating versions of published papers through digital repositories.