Scholarly publishing and the internet: A NM&S themed section

As co-editors of this themed section of New Media & Society, we introduce the four articles comprising the section and briefly address facets of the changes transpiring in scholarly publishing and, more generally, scholarly communication. A plethora of issues and developments is related to this transformation and we suggest the diversity and challenges involved. We mention one development in more detail, enhanced publishing, and conclude with promising inroads for theoretical understanding and empirical investigation of how scholarly publishing and communication are evolving.


Introduction
There is ongoing tumult in the world of scholarly publishing, which has been a matter of concern among stakeholders in the enterprise -scholars, editors, publishers, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies -for decades (e.g., Calabrese, 1992;Peek and Newby, 1996;Roberts, 1999). The concern has become more acute since widespread These two events constituted the backdrop for this NM&S themed section, published at SAGE OnlineFirst almost a year after the iCS/OII symposium. The manuscripts were subjected to one-direction blind peer review as well as a form of open peer review, making use of the WordPress plugin Digress.it. As is common with NM&S articles, the manuscripts underwent multiple revisions and, in some cases, multiple rounds of review.

Articles
The first article in the section is by Phil Pochoda who presents a perspective drawing from his long career in publishing, including directorship of the University of Michigan Press. He suggests that the analogue publishing system has now been replaced by one mainly digital in nature. More substantial than this relatively technical transformation, Pochoda argues that the new publishing arena is radically different from traditional publishing: it is unbounded, amorphous, and very much in flux. Pochoda claims this situation is the basis for an epistemic shift. Borrowing a metaphor popular with seismologists, he suggests that the ongoing changes in scholarly publication may reflect a major transformation comparable to 'the big one'. The second article, co-authored by Sophia Acord and Diane Harley, draws on a multi-year research project entitled the Future of Scholarly Communication and conducted under the auspices of the Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education. While the project was wide-ranging and resulted in diverse reports (e.g., Harley et al., 2010;Harley and Acord, 2011), this article concentrates on the uptake of new media for sharing and for openness in scholarly communication. Findings from scholars at different career stages and academic areas suggest that the uptake of new media is limited; differences largely relate to disciplinary cultures and more idiosyncratic aspects such as credit received, time available and researcher personality. Harley and Acord conclude by suggesting that notions from anthropologist Mary Douglas on the maintenance of classifications within different social categories may help understand the (lack of) uptake of social media in scholarly communities. It may be, in fact, that fragmentation of traditional social networks combined with proliferation of online social networking impede interdisciplinary exchange -a possibility that the authors feel merits consideration in future investigations on the transformation of scholarly communication.
The third article, prepared by John Willinsky and Johanne Provençal, presents a historical analysis of features of scholarship in monasteries during the Middle Ages. Some of the features of this period in scholarship -patronage, environment for study, and communality -contributed to what the authors more generally term the intellectual properties of learning. Willinsky and Provençal suggest parallels to the modern-day university system, particularly the tension between constraints imposed through private and institutional forms of sponsorship and more general objectives of learning. The authors argue for exploration of innovations in scholarship made possible during the digital era that facilitate the ideals of learning. Two such innovations are the repositories of scholarship established by many universities and the growing assortment of tools for academic publishing, such as those made available by the Public Knowledge Project.
The fourth and final contribution to this themed section is prepared by a team of UK researchers -James Stewart, Rob Procter, and Robin Williams − and explores Web 2.0 innovations developed by two distinctly different scholarly publishers, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Public Library of Science (PloS). This study complements an earlier investigation commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN) that focused on the uptake of social media by researchers (Procter et al., 2010b). In this contribution the authors explore the strategies and constraints experienced by publishers involved in developing innovations within a Web 2.0 environment. While both of the publishers studied have played an important role in generating such innovations, they have also been restricted by a degree of indifference and sometimes resistance from users. For publishers, the authors suggest that a 'perpetual beta' approach to innovations may help identify user disposition at an early stage, and this awareness may be more beneficial to successful innovations than sheer size and available resources of a publishing house.

Other developments
While it is not possible within this introduction to discuss the large number of innovations ongoing in scholarly publishing, it would be remiss not to acknowledge however briefly some of the more prominent and recent developments such as a hybrid publishing model crafted by the University of Michigan Press and adapted by other university presses and some commercial enterprises (e.g., Bradley et al., 2011). 2  Somewhat related to the aspirations of Force11 is concern about 'enhanced publishing', an initiative to incorporate web functionalities into scholarly publishing. 5 While it is increasingly common for authors and sometimes publishers to prepare informational websites to accompany books, it is less common for Web 2.0 functionalities to be included, such as blogs, and other interactive communicative services. It is even less common to encounter Web 3.0 or Semantic Web functionality, providing interoperability between, for example, the references in a publication and the content of those references. Jankowski et al. (2012) present an overview of enhanced publishing and report on an effort to develop a prototype for book monographs. Figure 2 suggests the interrelation between individual book websites and their content, and connections to other web-based materials.

Theoretical grounding
While the above-mentioned initiative regarding enhanced publishing is practically oriented and focuses on technical aspects of interoperability, it is grounded in a theory of communicative openness and draws on work by Merton (1979) and the interplay of formal and informal spheres of communication in scholarship (Garvey, 1979). The relation between interface and infrastructure of openness, along with the associated concepts, are illustrated in Figure 3 and are conceived as structural manifestations of human action involved with creating and using digital communication media.
Many other theoretical perspectives and concepts are applicable to understanding transformation in scholarly publishing and communication. The diffusion of innovations, for example, is a well-established approach and has been recently considered in new media settings ; it is also one of the approaches used by Stewart, Procter, Williams, and Poschen in their case studies of two publishers presented in this NM&S themed section (Procter et al., in press). Space does not permit an extended overview of perspectives and models; that is an exercise more fitting for a review of the literature in a PhD dissertation, and Mackenzie Owen (2005) provides Source: Tatum and Jankowski (2012: 194). such in 'The scientific article in the age of digitalization'. The review acknowledges a common formulation (e.g., Rowland, 1997;Ware and Mabe, 2009: 12) of basic functions of scholarly publishing (registration, disseminating, certification, archival record), and subsequent refinement of these functions. He criticizes various conduit models of communication and elaborates his own phase mode; see Figure 4. While this model benefits by identification of activities taking place at different stages in the research process, it does not suggest the cyclic nature of research and the blend of informal and formal communication activities that transpires at different points in the cycle. 6

Next steps
In keeping with the overall objective of NM&S to contribute to theoretically and empirically-based understanding of new media developments, it is appropriate that we note areas for further research. The authors to the articles in this themed section have done this for their respective approaches; our purpose is to suggest a few overarching queries that merit attention. Research agendas have been developed elsewhere by representatives from different disciplines. For example, in 2007 the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL, 2007) prepared such an agenda and identified eight themes relevant to librarianship. A similar agenda from the disciplinary perspective of media and communication studies has not, to our knowledge, been compiled, but probably would contain clusters of research questions related to the traditional -and intertwined -components of the communication process: sender, content, receiver, and context. Myriad models have been constructed with these and more elaborate constructs, and are addressed in detail elsewhere (e.g., McQuail and Windahl, 1993). 7 While the specificities of these models may not be entirely relevant to scholarly communication in a networked environment, the four above-mentioned components can serve as a clustering mechanism for research interests. Below are illustrations of guiding questions for each of these components: Such questions can be addressed in various ways, but focused case studies, comparative in nature and across time, offer much potential for understanding the ongoing changes in scholarly communication. This is basically the approach for the research conducted by contributors to this themed section (e.g., Acord and Harley, 2012;Stewart et al., 2012). A case study approach is also undertaken in two Research Information Network (RIN) studies Meyer et al., 2011) on the uptake of social media across disciplines and institutions. While these studies were limited in scope and exploratory in nature, the mapping exercises poignantly visualize the differences found between cases in the humanities and those in the natural sciences; see Figures 5 and 6. These visualizations beg for further substantiation and elaboration about how scholarly cultures contribute to communication practices in a networked environment along axes reflecting degrees of computational complexity and collaboration. In terms of a research agenda on the transformation of scholarly communication, these visualizations and the studies on which they are based provide much promise.
In conclusion, we wish to endorse the initiative taken by John Willinsky and Johanne Provençal in making their article available at the Stanford University repository. Other authors of the articles in this themed section have taken similar steps with institutional repositories and we are following their lead by placing this introductory essay in the University of Illinois at Chicago repository, INDIGO. In addition to increasing access to the results of scholarship through repositories of publications, we feel collaborative sharing at early stages of scholarship important, as is made possible through the social bookmarking functions of some reference management systems, particularly the services Zotero and Mendeley. To this end we have created an open group on Mendeley entitled 'Scholarly Communication: Theory and Research, Policy and Practice' where the resources compiled for this essay (e.g., annotations and references) and other projects (e.g., Jankowski et al., 2012;Tatum and Jankowski, 2012) are deposited. We hope these materials might contribute to the endeavors of others in exploring future directions of scholarly communication. Finally, some of the authors to this NM&S themed section have prepared podcasts on their work; these can be viewed at SAGE Podcast and at the NM&S website. Figure 5. Humanities complexity continuum. these two events, also prepared accompanying websites, for which we are grateful. The Virtual Knowledge Studio and the e-Humanities Group, both initiatives of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, provided a welcome home during preparation of the above events and exploration of a facet of scholarly communication − enhanced publications. Finally, we extend our thanks to the authors who contributed to this themed section for their patience and comments on a preliminary draft of this introductory essay.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Notes 1. A map of the Twitter feed for the symposium, uploaded to the website of this panel, suggests a diversified and relatively large volume of tweets for the symposium overall; see   Breure et al. (2011) suggest an alternative term, Rich Internet Publications, for basically the same development. 6. A cyclic model is suggested in Jankowski (2009) and Tatum and Jankowski (2012). 7. In fairness, it should be mentioned that the communication models presented by McQuail and Windahl (1993)