Scholarly Communication Roadmap

Scholarly Communication Roadmap
Name	Scholarly Communication Roadmap
Type	Framework
Established	21st century
Stakeholders	Libraries; Universities; Publishers; Funders; Researchers
Location	Global

Contents

Scholarly Communication Roadmap

The Scholarly Communication Roadmap is a strategic framework guiding how Harvard University, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and other institutions coordinate dissemination of research through platforms like arXiv, PubMed Central, CrossRef, ORCID, and DOAJ. It aligns policies from funders such as the National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and National Science Foundation with infrastructure developed by Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Elsevier, and Springer Nature.

Overview and Purpose

The Roadmap articulates aims shared by European Commission, UNESCO, World Health Organization, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and regional consortia like Jisc to promote open access through repositories such as Zenodo, EThOS, HAL (open archive), DSpace, and metadata services like ORCID and CrossRef. It informs university policies at Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Princeton University, and University of Cambridge to harmonize mandates from funders including Wellcome Trust and NIH with publisher practices at Taylor & Francis and Wiley. The purpose includes improving discoverability across aggregators like Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Dimensions (database), and Microsoft Academic while addressing rights managed by Creative Commons.

Origins trace to initiatives by Max Planck Society, Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and projects like Open Archives Initiative, Budapest Open Access Initiative, and archive-building at Los Alamos National Laboratory that led to arXiv. Policy drivers include mandates from National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, and legislative actions such as Plan S and debates in the European Parliament and U.S. Congress. Technological advances from Internet Archive, Amazon Web Services, ORCID, and protocols like OAI-PMH catalyzed platforms including Figshare and Mendeley while controversies involving Elsevier and legal actions around Cambridge University Press informed stewardship models by ICMJE and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

Core components involve repositories like PubMed Central, arXiv, HAL (open archive), Zenodo; discovery via CrossRef, Scopus, Web of Science; identifiers such as DOI and ORCID; and licensing via Creative Commons. Stakeholders include universities (e.g., University of Toronto, University of Melbourne), funders (NIH, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council), publishers (Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis), libraries (Library of Congress, British Library), and professional societies like American Chemical Society and IEEE. Service providers include Portico, CLOCKSS, Dryad, Figshare, and standards bodies such as NISO and W3C.

Effective strategies mirror policies adopted by Wellcome Trust, European Commission, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and consortia like Knowledge Unlatched and COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), combining funder mandates, institutional repositories at Harvard University, University of Oxford, and licensing via Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to enable reuse. Best practices include persistent identifiers from CrossRef and ORCID, preservation through Portico and CLOCKSS, metadata standards endorsed by NISO, and workflow integration with tools like Publons, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley. Agreements such as transformative agreements negotiated between University of California and Elsevier inform subscription-to-open transitions used by Jisc and Projekt DEAL.

Evaluation relies on bibliometrics from Web of Science, Scopus, altmetrics from Altmetric (company), usage analytics provided by COUNTER, and data citations tracked in DataCite. Impact assessment considers policy reports by OECD, European Commission, National Academy of Sciences, and institutional reviews at University of Cambridge and MIT, while avoiding misuse exemplified in disputes over proprietary metrics maintained by Clarivate. Metrics ought to integrate responsible frameworks such as the Leiden Manifesto and DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) used by funders including Wellcome Trust and NIH.

Challenges mirror tensions between major publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley) and consortia like Projekt DEAL and Jisc over pricing, transformative agreements, and access, alongside copyright disputes involving Cambridge University Press and privacy concerns regulated by laws like the General Data Protection Regulation. Ethical issues involve predatory journals associated with controversies around OMICS (publisher), authorship disputes mediated by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), and data integrity concerns raised in cases involving retractions cataloged by Retraction Watch. Equity issues affect researchers in Global South institutions such as University of Cape Town and Universidade de São Paulo in negotiations with publishers and funders like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Future pathways engage initiatives from Plan S, UNESCO, European Commission open science policies, and national strategies by United States National Science Foundation and UK Research and Innovation to expand open infrastructures like OpenAIRE and federated services from COAR. Policy implications include adopting mandates modeled on Plan S and NIH policies, negotiating equitable agreements as seen in Projekt DEAL and transformative deals by Jisc, and investing in interoperable infrastructures like ORCID, CrossRef, DataCite, Zenodo, and preservation with CLOCKSS to support global participation by institutions such as Peking University and University of Tokyo.

Category:Scholarly communication