Scholarly Ecosystem Collaboration Potentialities: A SAGE White Paper Update

The lifecycle of academic works from idea to investigation -followed by publication, discovery, access, and usage -is supported by extensive cross-sector collaboration throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, transformational changes occurring worldwide within the knowledge creation and publication landscape have disturbed traditional divisions of labor and established codes of practice, as well as changed researcher experiences and marketplace products. Therefore, long-standing conventions and relationships among libraries, publishers, vendors, and readers/researchers are now being revisited, renegotiated, and reinvented. With the aim of furthering collaborative cross-sector conversations, SAGE commissioned a study among scholarly communications ‘value chain’ experts. Results were reported in January 2012 as a white paper titled Improving Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twentieth Century: Collaboration Opportunities for Librarians, Publishers, and Vendors. Since then, various commissioned studies, research reports, journal articles, standards initiatives, and white papers have offered further insights into the rapidly evolving scholarly communications landscape. Additionally, established academic publishers are producing new discovery acceleration tools that anticipate evolving research workflow of novice researcher and expert scholars. Within the larger context of evolving international standards, best practices, business models, and codes of behavior, these new ‘value added scholarly environments’ predict ‘pushing the boundaries’ for discoverability and fulfillment of the scholarly corpus, as well as its creation, dissemination, navigation, visibility, and usage, on the open web and within library services.