The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released the final report of "Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication", a study that ARL commissioned Ithaka to conduct. The study, conducted by Nancy L. Maron and K. Kirby Smith, comes with the database of exemplars that it produced.
In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka's Strategic Services Group to conduct an investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars. The focus was on those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them. The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work. But the decentralised distribution of these new-model works has made it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number.
Ithaka's findings are based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and Canada. Field librarians talked with faculty members on their campuses about the digital scholarly resources they find most useful and reported the works they identified. The authors evaluated each resource gathered by the field team and conducted interviews of project leaders of 11 representative resources. Ultimately, 206 unique digital resources spanning eight formats were identified that met the study's criteria.
The study's innovative qualitative approach is seen to have yielded a rich cross-section of the latest digital scholarly resources. The report profiles each of the eight genres of resources, including discussion of how and why the faculty members reported using the resources for their work, how content is selected for the site, and what financial sustainability strategies the resources are employing. Each section draws from the in-depth interviews to provide illustrative anecdotes and representative examples.
The report is freely available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf.
In August 2008, ARL had released 'PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy,' by Ben Grillot, legal intern for ARL. To help authors make informed choices about their rights, Grillot compared how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the revised NIH Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo.
