Scholarly communications: A history from content as king to content as kingmaker

摘要

Scholarly Communications provides a history of the scholarly publishing industry, focusing on the period of rapid change over the last 50 years, and suggests some directions for future growth. Early chapters describe the history of scholarly journals and scholarly monographs, followed by the "secondary publishing industry," which includes abstracting and indexing and the more recent development of discovery services. "The Rise and Fall of the CD-ROM Technology" provides a cautionary tale on the way to the heart of Scholarly Communications: "The Birth of Online," in which Regazzi lays out how the rise of the online information industry ultimately led to greater access, creating an explosion of content that needs greater discovery services and circumstances that force publishers, librarians, and researchers to "assum[e] new roles" (p. 157). The next pair of chapters delves into the economics of publishing, institutional buyers, scholars, and open access. The last section of Regazzi's work, "Big Data, Big Science, and Social Academic Networks," along with "The Rise of Work Flow Systems," introduces two themes. The first is the developing interconnections of the scholarly communication process and products, including the blending of formal and informal communication. The second theme is a turn outward from the academy to other industries that could benefit from integration with scholarly information.