There is growing dissatisfaction with the established research communication system, stemming from a variety of factors including rapidly rising subscription prices, concerns about copyright, latency between results and their actual publication, and restrictions on what can be published and how it can be disseminated. This has resulted into a global debate on how to remedy the system's deficiencies, and that debate has inspired concrete initiatives aimed at reforming the process to ensure access issues by seeking to alleviate two longstanding problems: the "serials crisis," which addresses the often prohibitive prices of journal publications that impede access to scholarly materials, and the
"permissions crisis," which addresses the restrictions on use of publications once access has been obtained (Henry, 2003; Van de Sompel, et al. 2004).
At the beginning of the 21st century, research communication is going through difficult times with most of the university presses and the commercial publishers who are still active in this field struggling to find ways to continue publishing scholarly research work (Darko-Ampem, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Borgman, 2007). The established scholarly communication system has not kept pace with revolutionary changes in research practice (Van de Sompel, et al. 2004). The question that arises is as Meadows (1998) poses, “How could communication of research be handled most efficiently as funding slowed?” (p. ix). He sees development of computers as a facilitator to rapid manipulation of large quantities of information and increasingly effective tools for the communication of research. Van de Sompel et al. (2004) see increased computer power, more pervasive computing, search technologies, collaboration, authentication, and security as the drivers of the likely technologies that may have an influence on the future of research communication. Increased computer power enables collaborative working, such as the Grid, virtual reality, data mining, and the fast exchange of more non-text
materials. Pervasive computing includes mobile and wireless computing, wearable computers, speech recognition and personalisation (Van de Sompel, et al. 2004).
Roosendaal & Geurts (1997) hold that scientific communication nowadays means electronic communication or electronic dissemination of "knowledge", which implies a virtual carrier for the virtual product, making use of a virtual memory. Atkins et al.
(2003) envision “an environment in which raw data and results are easily shared, not just within a research group or institution but also between scientific disciplines and locations. There is an existing opportunity to share insights, software, and knowledge, to reduce wasteful recreation and repetition” (p. 12).
Rethinking and redesigning research organisations and processes to make best use of information communication technologies is requisite for success. Atkins et al. (2003) explain that this is not about “simply automating existing methodologies and practices”
but advanced cyberinfrastrure which offers the potential to conduct new types of research in new ways (p.15).
Scholars/researchers can also use the new infrastructure to educate the next generations of scholars/researchers, using best techniques, spanning disciplinary boundaries, and democratising participation. It can enhance international collaboration and resource sharing. Cyberinfrastructure has great potential to empower people who, because of their physical capabilities, location, or history, have been excluded from the frontiers of scientific/scholarly research and education (Atkins, et al., 2003; Nentwich, 2005;
Borgman, 2007).
The conference of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) held in London on 8 April 2005 addressed the topic of how scholarly publishing could operate and develop in an established web environment and the resolve was that the adoption of the Internet technology had the potential to bring new features and services to researchers (Ashling, 2005). The keynote speech outlined the development of a scholarly communication process that was no longer a simple linear chain from author (researcher) to publisher to reader, but one of constant refinement and improvement involving the author as a central player. There should be a move from
“what researchers want” to “what researchers are doing” with existing electronic resources because understanding where usage had increased dramatically would provide invaluable information to publishers and to those assessing the quality of research at
specific establishments. This is possible with the availability of automated tools coupled with better metadata (Ashling, 2005).
The practices of scholarship and research communication are changing rapidly as continuous improvements in computing and network technologies, digital data capture and storage facilities, and powerful data mining techniques enable researchers to engage in highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive research practices (Van de Sompel, et al., 2004; Nentwich, 2005; Warner, 2005; Borgman, 2007). Talking about the status quo of research in the era of ICT-based applications, Nentwich (2003) describes ICT-enabled scientific research (cyberscience) as a “moving target. There is no day without a new E-journal seeing the light of day, without new ‘cyber-collaborations’ or without a new piece of software which might change the way scholars work,” (p. 4). He describes cyberscience as “evolving and innovating along the path.” He adds that researchers in all fields are trying to stay abreast of this moving target, but barely succeed because the empirical evidence contained in articles is outdated the minute they are published.
These dramatic changes in the nature of scientific research require correspondingly fundamental changes in the research communication system. Scholars and researchers alike deserve an innately digital, network-based scholarly communication system that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time (Roosendaal & Geurts, 1997; Kling & McKim, 1999; Kling, 2004; Van de Sompel, et al., 2004; Nentwich, 2005; Warner, 2005). To record scholarship effectively, the notion of the unit of communication must be extended from the journal article to include rich media, datasets and software and also a system that provides for the early registration of communication units through the possibility of preservation separate from the conventional sequence of scholarly publication. This calls for a more flexible approach that would permit the composition of complex documents that aggregate and extend other complex documents (Warner, 2005). The result is that the traditional, linear, batch processing approach is now undergoing a process of continuous refinement as scholars/researchers write, review, annotate, and revise in near- real time using the Internet (Atkins, et. al., 2003; Warner, 2005; Borgman, 2007). In the near-term, the publication process will be characterised by semantically marked-up electronic complex documents as the masters, with display and print versions secondary (Warner, 2005).
Thus, the linear information chain is being fundamentally transformed into an interactive communication network – exactly what is required to support the present societal demands for knowledge growth and management (Roosendaal & Geurts, 1997).
There is, therefore, need to look at possible configurations of communication as communication can only be effective and efficient if its configuration appeals to the research community and the society at large (Roosendaal and Geurts, 1997; Kling, McKim et al., 2003; Kling, 2004; Borgman, 2007). Scholars need a communication system that helps them efficiently publish, access, reuse and assess the relevance and quality of information (Warner 2005). Ashling (2005) further stresses this when he urges publishers to listen to and observe how their customers use technology, since the most popular innovations of the digital era, for example, the Web, browsers, e-mail, instant messaging, texting, peer-to-peer file sharing, blogs, and wikis, have been user- and communication-driven.
Thus, there is need to address the role of communication and its organisation in relation to the entire research process. Van de Sompel et. al. (2004) argue that the future research communication system should closely resemble and be intertwined with the research endeavour itself, rather than being its after-thought or annex. The same views are held by Borgman (2007), Kling, et al. (2003) and Casal (2007). It should comprise an interoperability substrate allowing flexible composition of value-adding services that, up to now, have been vertically locked in the journal publication milieu. In this loosely coupled system, the units of scholarly communication (i.e., data, simulations, informal results, preprints, etc.) could follow a variety of scholarly value chains in which each hub provides a service such as registering results, certifying their validity, alerting scholars to new claims and findings, preserving the scholarly record, and ultimately rewarding scholars for their work (Van de Sompel, et al. 2004). They see a unit of communication in a future scholarly communication system constituting the following:
• Datasets, simulations, software, and dynamic knowledge representations complex documents that flexibly aggregate the products of the scholarly endeavor, regardless of their format or location, which are recursively available for inclusion into other compound units. Such technology would provide for the reuse and derivation of existing results that is an integral part of the scholarly process
• Early registration (and, ultimately, preservation) of all units in the system, regardless of their nature or stage of development. This would facilitate collaborative network-based endeavors and increase the speed of discovery.
Preprints, raw datasets, prototype simulations, and the like should be afforded the ability to proceed through the scholarly value chain in the same manner that only journal publications are afforded in the current system (Van de Sompel, et al.
2004).
It is anticipated that such flexibility would empower individual research communities to decide which actions constitute registering a unit of communication, as well as what the community deems acceptable with respect to the timing of registration and how that relates to the quality of what is to be registered. In addition to facilitating an increased speed of discovery, a more flexible environment would allow scholars to officially incorporate into the system of communication materials that are currently largely living in a grey literature area (Van de Sompel, et al. 2004).
Table 2.2 below presents a summary of the trend in communication of research.
Table 2.2: Changes in academia on the path to cyberscience (Nentwich, 2003, p. 25)