The role of the HE institutions in scholarly publishing and communication

Authors

  • Stuart M. Shieber School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/5.3671

Abstract

See video of the presentation.

Institutions of higher education are in a double bind with respect to scholarly communication: On the one hand, they need to support the research needs of their students and researchers by providing access to the journals that comprise the archival record of scholarship. Doing so requires payment of substantial subscription fees. On the other hand, they need to provide the widest possible dissemination of works by those same researchers -- the fruits of that very research -- which itself incurs costs. I address how these two goals, each of which demands outlays of substantial funds, can best be honored. In the course of the discussion, I provide a first look at some new results on predicting journal usage, which allows for optimizing subscriptions.


Author Biography

Stuart M. Shieber, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, and the faculty director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. His primary research field is computational linguistics, the study of human languages from the perspective of computer science. He was the founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and is a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Professor Shieber led Harvard’s efforts to institute open-access policies leading to the policies now in place at Harvard and emulated elsewhere.

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Published

2015-11-24

Issue

No. 5 (2015): The 10th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2015

Section

Presentations

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