Scholarly Societies and Scholarly Communication: A Look Ahead

Abstract

Roger C. Schonfeld is Director, Library and Scholarly Communication Program at Ithaka S+R; e-mail: Roger.Schonfeld@ithaka.org. © 2015 Roger C. Schonfeld, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. In many academic and professional fields, the society-sponsored journal has for a century had a unique position in scholarly discourse. An annual meeting and conference provided intellectual exchange and social stimulation, while the journal provided a more formal mechanism to communicate, to review, to evaluate, and to certify. In celebrating the rich contributions C&RL has made over the past 75 years, we find ourselves in a moment of profound change in the ways that scholarship is conducted and communicated. These changes in scholarly production and distribution, combined with a growing diversity in how research itself is conducted, provide C&RL new opportunities to maintain its leadership position in the library field. The 75th anniversary of the journal is an opportune time for a bold examination of how ACRL and C&RL can continue to facilitate the scholarship of librarianship.1 C&RL has pursued a number of strategic decisions with real implications for its role in the community, including the shift to an open-access publishing model, the partnership with a third-party platform provider for its distribution infrastructure, and the cessation of its print version. Moving C&RL to the HighWire platform infrastructure modernized discoverability and usability while spreading the cost of developing new features across a broader base of publishers and publications (although it is not without its risks).2 Moving to open access makes it possible for the core content of the journal to reach an unrestricted audience, which should allow for thinking about expanding readership and developing new audiences. And the elimination of print affords opportunities to begin reimagining the periodicity of the journal and the type of content it contains, including the nature of the article itself. These are major steps that, if seized effectively, can reposition C&RL in a variety of ways that make it a vanguard of professional communications for academic librarians. At the same time, the environment for publishing on library-related issues has not been static. Several new publications have been developed, such as portal: Libraries and the Academy and In the Library with the Lead Pipe, the former published by Johns Hopkins University Press with an emphasis on technology, academic partnerships, and institutional missions, the latter self-hosted and focusing on “libraries and library workers” with an emphasis on their potential for community transformation.3 The editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned amid concerns about the inability for authors to retain certain rights without requiring fees charged to them.4 In addition, a number of library-related organizations, including CLIR, OCLC, and my own Ithaka S+R, have maintained or developed publishing programs of their own, typically anchored by a series of research reports in addition to perspective pieces, newsletters, blogs, and other formats, with both staff and guest authorship. Journalism