From the press release:
A new portfolio of research projects will be focusing on transitions to electronic-only publication, gaps in access, the dynammics of improving access to research papers and the future of scholarly communication.
The scholarly communications landscape has been transformed over the past few years, in the UK and across the world. Technological change has brought – and continues to bring – profound changes in the roles that researchers, funders, research institutions, publishers, aggregators, libraries and other intermediaries play in disseminating and providing access to quality-assured research outputs, in their goals and expectations, and in the services they provide and use. There are shared ambitions for significantly enhanced access, but no consensus on how best to achieve it.
Understanding the nature and implications of these changes, and the interrelationships between them, is thus of critical importance if we are to exploit the potential of new technologies and services to the full. The Research Information Network (RIN), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Publishers Association (PA), the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), the British Library (BL), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), SPARC Europe, Research Councils UK (RCUK), Universities UK (UUK), the Wellcome Trust and others have been working to this end. They are now seeking to establish a joint portfolio of work to underpin and facilitate transitions over the next few years.
The joint portfolio will focus intially on four projects, though more may follow.
E-only scholarly journals: overcoming the barriers, which will investigate the barriers – from the perspectives of libraries, publishers and users – to moving to e-only publishing of scholarly journals, and ways in which those barriers might be overcome; …
The first report, E-only scholarly journals: overcoming the barriers, is available to download below. Hard copies can be requested by emailing contact@rin.ac.uk
