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New Reporting on Digital Transformation From Ithaka S+R

New Reporting on Digital Transformation From Ithaka S+R

January 2024

Additional Details

Roger Schonfeld contributed a post to the Scholarly Kitchen that provides some additional information about this new work from Ithaka! 

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication...Ithaka S+R reviews this strategic landscape as part of a broader analysis of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. Here, we provide an abbreviated summary of seven key strategic pillars of this second digital transformation. 

A brief sample of the recommendations from the report:

  • We recommend that identifier providers collaboratively create an institutional toolkit that provides concrete cost-benefit analyses and implementation strategies and tactics to guide research institutions (Recommendation 3).
  • We recommend that smaller and midsize publishing organizations, looking across organizational models and governance types, find their collective voice in the enterprise publishing systems marketplace, to ensure that they are advocating effectively for their long-term strategic interests (Recommendation 4).
  • We recommend that enterprise publishing systems providers invest in key functional and architectural priorities, for example to advance research integrity, open access business models, and the atomization of the research article (Recommendation 5).
  • We recommend that publishing organizations participate in digital preservation services to ensure long term access and preservation, recognizing that preservation is a lifecycle process, not a final stage after publication (Recommendation 9).
  • We recommend that publishing organizations and libraries invest not only in the preservation of the final published outputs of the research project but also critical and irreplaceable sources, such as observational data and primary source materials (Recommendation 10).

The full report is fully accessible in both HTML and PDF file formats here.

Abstract

Citation: Bergstrom, Tracy, et al. "The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure." Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R. 29 January 2024. Web. 29 January 2024. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210