Notes

1. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

2. Ithaka is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide. Ithaka promotes innovation in higher education by supporting entrepreneurial not-for-profit initiatives to develop sustainable organizational and business models. It aims to combine a commitment to the core values of higher education, a deep understanding of technology and its impact, and experience developing economically sustainable not-for-profit business models, to help advance community-wide benefits during this time of technological transition.

3. The database is available at http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/search-form.shtml.

4. For a list of institutions that participated in the field team, please see Appendix A.

5. Several faculty members did, in fact, mention search engines and aggregations of links. See note 4 for a discussion of those resources that were excluded from the field study.

6. While 240 of the entries faculty and librarians submitted to the study database met the criteria set out by ARL as “scholarly and original,” 115 did not. These resources, though often of high quality, were excluded from analysis for this report. They included: aggregations of links to other sites; software and digital tools; digital copies of print content; industry newsletters; commercial and/or mass audience sites; and teaching-focused resources. Faculty reported using these resources daily far more often than they did the resources that include works of original scholarship. This suggests that scholars’ priority is to find relevant content, regardless of where it is hosted. Among the additional reasons faculty cited for using these resources were quick access, easy searching, and useful overviews.

7. See Appendix B for a listing of the 206 unique resources discussed in this report.

8. For a list of the interviewees and resources, see Appendix C.

9. For an ongoing study of scholarly communication, assessing “how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers,” see Diane Harley, Sarah Earl-Novell, Sophia Krzys Acord, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King, “Interim Report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication” (Spring 2008), available at http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=300.

10. It is worth noting that the librarians who conducted these conversations may have been inclined to seek out faculty members with a reputation for being active users of digital resources, so these numbers may not be representative of rates of contribution across the academy.

11. See Appendix D for a breakdown of the eight different genres of content discussed in the paper, by disciplinary group.

12. Interview with Lance Gunderson, editor-in-chief of Ecology and Society, August 20, 2008.

13. Interview with Mark Selden, a founder of Japan Focus, July 18, 2008.

14. Peter Suber, SPARC Newsletter, September 2008, available at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-08.htm#prestige.

15. Diane Harley, Sarah Earl-Novell, Jennifer Arter, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King, “The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices,” in The Journal of Electronic Publishing 10, no. 2 (Spring 2007), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0010.204.

16. Interview with Moshe Pritsker, CEO, and Nikita Bernstein, CTO of JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments, August 15, 2008. Following our interview, JoVE was accepted for indexing in MEDLINE and PubMED, the official databases maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Co-founder Pritsker points out that JoVE is the first video journal to be accepted by NLM, an act that constitutes the “official ‘blessing’ of the scientific community for JoVE specifically and for the multimedia-based scientific journals in general.”

17. Interview with Richard Hamilton, editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review, July 27, 2008.

18. Interview with David Kammerling Smith, editor-in-chief of H-France, August 18, 2008.

19. For example, 77% of those resources classified here as professional/academic hubs include working papers/technical reports as one of their content types. Many of these hubs are themselves society and association sites.

20. The Ithaka Report “Scholarly Communications in the Biosciences Discipline” highlights the reluctance of those in some branches of biology to share pre-publication work beyond small, private groups of colleagues, the result of deep concerns about having one’s research “scooped,” and the importance of peer-reviewed publication to tenure and promotion decisions. Available at: http://www.ithaka.org/publications/pdfs/JSTOR%20BioSci%20Study%20Report%20Public%20final1031.pdf

21. Interview with Justin Systma, academic consultant for PhilSci Archive, July 25, 2008. Project founder John Norton was interviewed via e-mail, as well.

22. Interview with Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Digital Library Projects at Johns Hopkins University, August 13, 2008. For more on the relationship between data in the humanities and the sciences, see L. Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy L. Stinson, The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative, available at: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/VO-and-roman-de-la-rose-collaborative-imperative.

23. Interview with Aaron Krowne, founder of PlanetMath, July 24, 2008.

24. Interview with Helen Berman, Director of the Protein Data Bank, August 2008.

25. The Science of Collaboratories project, http://www.scienceofcollaboratories.org/, identified Community Data Systems as one of the types/venues for digital collaboration for scholarship.

26. Interview with Steve Kelling, Director of Information Science for the Cornell Ornithology Lab, and Chris Wood and Brian Sullivan, eBird project managers, July 21, 2008.

27. For a discussion of the range of sustainability options digital resources can consider, see Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths, and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources. An Ithaka Report, available at http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/sca_ithaka_sustainability_report-final.pdf.

28. Interview with Daniel Boisvert, a founder of PEA Soup, August 4, 2008.

29. Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008—Day 4: Blogging for Profit, available at http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/blogging-for-profit/.

30. It is worth noting that although none of the resources we defined as discussion forums focused on STM subjects, this does not imply that scientists do not engage in exchanges with colleagues. Those STM faculty who named sources they liked for facilitating exchanges with other scholars tended to cite data sites and hubs, rather than blogs and discussion lists, for this purpose.

31. For the Ithaka Report on Scholarly Communications in the History Discipline, please see http://www.ithaka.org/publications/History.

32. For a discussion of recommendations for the role of libraries in digital publishing on campus, see Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffths, and Matthew Rascoff, University Publishing in a Digital Age. An Ithaka Report (July 2007), available at http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/Ithaka University Publishing Report.pdf.