CSHE Report on the Future of Scholarly Communications

The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has released Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication, a report on faculty needs and practices in regards to scholarly communications. The report, based on interviews with 160 faculty members at 45 institutions, discusses issues such as:

• tenure and promotion
• dissemination of research
• patterns of sharing in-progress research
• collaboration
• public engagement

The following is an excerpt from the executive summary:

We describe here the results of our research conducted between 2007 and 2010. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their academic fields, as well as their careers, our approach focused on finegrained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including career advancement, sharing, collaborating, informal and formal publishing, resource generation, and engaging with the public. The report is based on the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. We concentrated on assessing scholars’ attitudes and needs as both producers and users of research results. The report is divided into eight chapters, which include a document synthesizing our research results plus seven detailed disciplinary case studies.