Framing has its roots in how journalists construct news in a way that makes sense to lay audiences. Frames capture the essence of an issue. They define what the problem is, and how to think about it. Often they suggest what should be done to remedy a problem (Kinder 1998).
In scholarly publishing as in many other industries, the Internet has also opened innovative new ways of doing business. A grass-roots movement of scientists advocating the publication of scientific journals openly on the Web, which they called “open access,” started in the mid-1990s (Guédon 2001). Open access can be seen as part of a larger Web-enabled phenomenon of peer production, user-generated content, and open-source development (Benkler 2002, 2006). The open access advocates propose two partly complementary solutions to the problem of restricted access and high subscription prices (Harnad et al. 2004). In what they call the “gold” solution, the journals themselves become openly accessible; in the “green” version the journals remain restricted, but authors post versions of their manuscripts in either subject-based repositories or institutional repositories that are openly accessible to readers.
The cellulose-based engine of academic life in the humanities and social sciences, otherwise known as the monograph, is being increasingly displaced not by MacBooks or FaceBook but by its long-standing junior companion, the journal. After playing a supporting role for centuries as a place for trial runs, interim reports, reviews, and updates, the journal article has become the principal measure of academic achievement in many disciplines. The journal does bring a measure of precision to the academy’s reputation economy, with the ISI Web of Science calculating journal Impact Factors to three decimal places, while the article’s relative brevity is well suited to annual assessments of merit and achievement. The journal also has a networked mobility and search capacity that lends itself to ready consultation and citation anywhere, anytime.
A staggering amount of energy was poured into implementing open access (OA) in 2008. This is an attempt to show its depth and breadth, while admitting that the full story can’t be captured in one article. There’s a lot of detail here, but it’s selective and I’ve tried to present just the highlights of 2008 in nine categories, with a 10th section for highlights of the highlights. To keep it within bounds, I’ve omitted some sections I’ve formerly included, such as open education, open access for public-sector information, and the universe of wikis. As always, apologies to the many projects I couldn’t include.
The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works that are accessible to end users directly, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work. The decentralized distribution of these new model works can make it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number, even for university librarians tasked with knowing about valuable resources across the disciplines. In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka to conduct an investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars, paying special attention to those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them.
With the advent of digital communication, scholarly publishing can be faster, less expensive, and more ubiquitous. That means that it is easier to keep up with the latest developments in our fields. And that, in turn, means we are expected to keep up with more information. So how do we do that well? We rely on those we trust (librarians, colleagues, journals, maybe even Google) to point out the things we should know.