Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines by Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King

Since  2005,  the  Center  for  Studies  in  Higher  Education  (CSHE),  with  generous  funding  from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs  and  practices  of  faculty  for  in-progress  scholarly  communication  (i.e.,  forms  of  communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work are available at the Future of Scholarly Communicationproject’s website.  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 fine-grained 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. This executive summary also includes overviews for each of the disciplinary case studies