I. Scholarly Communication at Rutgers University

Scholarly communication is the process by which authors produce works of scholarship and share them with a wide audience. Rutgers University's strategic plan "reaffirms the university's role as a generator of knowledge and recognizes the importance of diversity, access, and affordability." It "recognizes the value of international perspectives...and fosters an increased sense of community and cooperation as one university across disciplines and campuses." The Rutgers University Libraries have traditionally served as a repository and laboratory for researchers at all levels. The Libraries also have a strategic plan, The Rutgers Digital Library Initiative . "The DLI is a five-year plan to move aggressively, but intelligently, towards the creation of a new library system. That new library is characterized most specifically by its ability to use technology to enhance information services to students and faculty, to support new instructional methodologies, and to improve access to all forms of information." The DLI is transforming scholarship at Rutgers through a rapidly growing number of online indexes and databases and electronic journals that are shared simultaneously by many members of the Rutgers community regardless of location. Digital library projects and centers demonstrate innovative methods of employing local resources to enhance access. Technology is also enhancing the provision of interlibrary loan and electronic reserve services.

II. Research Library Perspectives

Trends in scholarly communication and publishing are raising serious challenges to research libraries' provision of publications to our faculty and students. In a nutshell: commercial publishers are establishing near-monopolies for the scholarly journals in many fields of the sciences, and then raise the prices to the extent that library subscriptions and book budgets suffer. According to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the average North American research library has paid 188% more for each journal subscription since 1986, and 77% more for each monograph. Serials expenditures are rising more rapidly, and acquisitions of monographs are declining." ARL's Office for Scholarly Communication disseminates useful information about many issues of interest to faculty. ARL is a leading participant in SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition. SPARC is establishing moderately priced, high quality electronic journals in the fields of expensive commercially published titles and has already had some success in moderating the price increases of their competing titles. Critics of the commercial publishers point out that the reinterpretation of copyright law in the electronic environment may endanger fair use practices that are vitally important to scholars and teachers. In March, 2000 a group of 36 university leaders issued a declaration of nine Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing, known as the Tempe Principles, aimed at protecting the interests of higher education against the threats described here.

III. Rutgers Scholarly Communication Initiative Update

Scholarly communication is not only a problem of prices and readers' access to publications, and of how academe maintains ownership of its own intellectual product: but of how the promotion and tenure process encourages and evaluates scholarship. In March, 1999 Rutgers sent six librarians and teaching faculty to a conference on scholarly communication in Washington, D.C., then followed up with symposia in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden in May. These activities are summarized here. The University Librarian created a Scholarly Communication Steering Committee in early 2001. It is charged with "leading a university-wide discussion of the changing nature of scholarly communication and its ramifications for the teaching and research faculty at Rutgers and beyond." In April, 2001 the Library Committee of the New Brunswick Faculty Council endorsed the Tempe Principles and encouraged academic departments and the university to include electronic publications in their assessment of candidates for promotion and tenure. The Libraries' steering committee held a series of luncheon discussions with teaching faculty on the three campuses between April and November 2001 that confirmed the earlier evidence that there is a wide range of faculty awareness and concern. Rutgers faculty serving as editors have a special opportunity to influence the scholarly communication system.

IV. Global Initiatives

The Internet presents scholars with endless opportunities for formal and informal research, communication, and publication that explode the conventional barriers of distance and cost. ArXiv.org is the physics preprint server that has revolutionized its discipline over the past decade. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has established standards and templates for the mounting and searching of freely available scholarly articles on the Internet as an alternative to the scholarly journal. The Public Library of Science (PLOS) calls upon scholars in the life sciences to pledge that they will publish their research only in journals that agree to permit free electronic distribution of their articles within six months of their appearance. Can these models of scholarly communication transfer to the social sciences and humanities? The Electronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSS) is a non-profit society based in the United Kingdom that seeks to improve scientific communication in the social sciences by facilitating low-cost and widely disseminated publications of high quality. H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine is an international organization of scholars in history and related disciplines centered around more than 100 moderated mailing lists with associated Web sites, book reviews, and other initiatives. H-Net is hosted by Michigan State University, which like Rutgers is a land grant university that is committed to the broad dissemination of scholarship as a public service.

V. Stop Reacting-- Take Action!

Members of the Rutgers community participate in the scholarly communication system in many roles and disciplines, but all are interdependent. We are planning a symposium, in collaboration with the New Brunswick Faculty Council, for spring 2002 on the New Brunswick campus.

For more information on what you can do, see the Declaring Independence and Gaining Independence pages of the Association of Research Libraries. At Rutgers University, contact Jim Niessen [niessen@rci.rutgers.edu] in the Alexander Library.

Scholarly Communication Steering Committee Final Report July 2002
Report of the Committee on Electronic Publishing and Tenure April 11, 1997