New white paper to report on current and potential future ecosystem of scholarly communications infrastructure

STM Solutions has provided sponsorship to enable Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit higher education research and consulting organization, to research and produce a white paper that examines the shared and essential scholarly communications infrastructure. Work on the paper is to begin immediately. A draft will be made available for public comment prior to the final publication slated for fall 2023. The paper will be freely available to all.

“As we enter a new phase of Open Access at a new and greater scale, as we  laid out in STM Trends 2026,  common infrastructure to support scholarly communications is more important than ever,” said Hylke Koers, Chief Information  Officer for STM Solutions. “It will be essential in ensuring researchers can publish, discover and read scholarly works  with ease and rely on the quality, integrity and trustworthiness of published research.”

“Ithaka S+R has a well-established and very strong reputation conducting this type of work within academia and we are delighted that they will be carrying out this project,” said Koers.

Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R notes that, "Building the infrastructure necessary to advance scholarly research and disseminate it effectively is a vital priority. At Ithaka S+R, we've been invested in the organizational structures and institutional design necessary to advance these objectives, particularly within research libraries, for many years. I'm so pleased that our work will contribute to building and sustaining community infrastructure that will enable all parties invested in the scholarly communication ecosystem to better support scholarship today and into the future.”

As the rapid evolution of research communication continues, and the academic record grows, dozens of platforms and tools and services have emerged - many of which play an essential role in the discovery, communication and interpretation of research findings. 

This project will enable a deeper understanding of this infrastructure, to identify weak points as well as opportunities for innovation and future development that will better support the needs of researchers, funders, publishers and librarians. Long-term trends in scholarly publication and how those trends place new and/or changing demands on the infrastructure will also be examined. Finally, a gap analysis will identify issues that currently are not being sufficiently addressed, where additional investments are needed, and where collective action is required.

Among those key stakeholders who will be interviewed during the research portion of the work: authors/researchers, funding agencies, publishers, libraries, organizations that provide services for scholarly communications, and organizations that represent these stakeholders.

Ithaka S+R will have full editorial independence in the production of this paper. 

This work is supported by funding from the American Chemical Society, Elsevier,  IEEE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.

Read Ithaka S+R's Roger Schonfeld's blog piece on the project.