Understanding the needs of scholars in a contemporary publishing environment

Abstract

The advent of digital scholarship, together with the increasing momentum of open access for research, have thrown scholarly publishing into flux. In the shifting landscape of scholarly communication, libraries are taking on new roles in order to publish scholarship in innovative forms: by building institutional and data repositories, for example, or collaborating with faculty to develop multimedia monographs or open access journals. The Publishing Without Walls project at the University of Illinois is developing a service model for university libraries to support scholar-driven, openly accessible, scalable, and sustainable publishing practices. To this end, we are conducting a multimodal study of scholars' needs, objectives, and practices in this new age of publishing. This poster presents preliminary results of a large-scale survey of scholars, which aims to shed light on what and how scholars want to publish, when and why they choose to publish digitally, and how they understand the success of their digital publications. This survey, in tandem with the results of a series of interviews and focus groups, is actively informing the development of two digital monograph series at the University of Illinois University Library, along with a model for their development that may be useful to other libraries involved with publishing new modes of scholarship.