The Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia has released Scholarly Communication Institute 8: Emerging Genres in Scholarly Communication.
Here's an excerpt:
The following essay attempts to represent and synthesize the rich discussions of SCI 8, the eighth gathering of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia Library, especially the many original insights that emerged into the ways technology transforms the process of creation, dissemination, stewardship, use, and above all, reception of humanities scholarship.. . .
As in other areas of publishing—music, movies, television, fiction, journalism— the Web has effectively unbundled the production and consumption of scholarship. It has also simultaneously undermined publishing business models and library budgets, radically altered reading habits, and called into question the core assumptions upon which scholarship is assessed and validated. How will the fundamental processes of scholarly production—research and analysis, publication and dissemination, stewardship, and use—realign themselves in a digital environment? How will scholars go from digital evidence to digital publication? What would be an appropriate division of labor among the actors in scholarly communication: scholars and learned societies; libraries, museums, archives; publishers; technologists; higher education administration and funders; and the multiple audiences and users who desire online access to humanities content? Where are these new communities constituted, how, and by whom?
We explored these issues in several stages, which included:
- scanning trends both within higher education and beyond that are shaping scholarly discourses;
- examining the processes of scholarly communication as currently constituted, as well as actors involved and the roles they play;
- presenting working examples of new-model scholarship by participants; and
- reflecting on these topics from the perspective of the critical engines sustaining scholarly communication—libraries, publishers, technologists, academic administrators, and funders.