The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh has released The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship. Report of a Workshop Held in Phoenix, Arizona, April 17 to 19, 2007, Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Here's an excerpt from the "Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations" section:
- The widespread availability of digital content is creating opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from the traditional way of using academic publications and research data. We call this "cyberscholarship". . . .
- The widespread availability of content in digital formats provides an infrastructure for novel forms of research. To support cyberscholarship it must be captured, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly different from conventional methods. . . .
- Development of the infrastructure requires coordination at a national and international level. . . . In the United States, since there is no single agency with this mission, we recommend a coordinating committee of the appropriate federal agencies. . . .
- Development of the content infrastructure requires a blend of research – both discipline-specific and in the enabling computer science – and implementation. . . .
- We propose a seven year timetable for implementation of the infrastructure. The first three years will emphasize a set of prototypes, followed by implementation of a coordinated group of systems and services.