In recent years, the number of academic studies in the field of science communication has increased. It is important to make a general examination of the studies on science communication and to reveal their distribution according to years and countries in order to draw the framework of science communication studies. The main aim of this study was…

Open-access (OA) options, including preprints and postprints, provide free access to research, accelerate the dissemination of academic work, are associated with increased impact of scholarly work, and may aid in dissemination of null results. However, OA publishing is not an established practice for many special education researchers, and journal…

The conversation with Alexandra Elbakyan intends to explore the Sci-Hub phenomenon and the core motives that initiated Sci-Hub. Accordingly, Sci-Hub is an open science project that has gone viral and is driven by people who pursue knowledge. The core idea behind the Sci-Hub is very simple: people should have access to knowledge without any…

In many academic and professional fields, the society-sponsored journal has for a century had a unique position in scholarly discourse. An annual meeting and conference provided intellectual exchange and social stimulation, while the journal provided a more formal mechanism to communicate, to review, to evaluate, and to certify. Changes in…

There is a dearth of research on the perceptions of faculty members in educational leadership regarding open access publications. This reality may exist because of a lack of funding for educational leadership research, financial obstacles, tenure demands, or reputation concerns. It may be that there are simply fewer established open access…

The growing expansion of Internet access and mass-scale usage of social networking platforms and search engines have forced digital newspapers to deal with challenges, amongst which are the need to constantly update news, the increasing complexity of sources, the difficulty of exercising their function as gatekeepers in a fragmented environment in…

Active academics whose careers span several decades have witnessed a changing landscape for disseminating their research and scholarship. As technology changes, the ability to share research increases exponentially, and the choice of outlets becomes more intricate. This article discusses the role of scholarship in the lives of seasoned college…

Introduction: Even though the current publishing model is based on digital dissemination, it still utilizes some of the basic principles of printed culture. Recently a policy emphasis towards open access has been set for publicly funded research. This paper reports on a study of the practices, business models and values linked with scholarly…

This paper assesses the performance of the "National Textbook Development and Distribution Policy for Pre-Tertiary Education" of 2002. It examines the policy in theory and in practice by exploring the extent to which the liberalisation of the textbook trade has helped to improve on textbook procurement, production and distribution,…

In this article, we present the case for regarding the principles by which scholarly publications are disseminated and shared as a matter of academic ethics. The ethics of access have to do with recognizing people's right to know what is known, as well as the value to humanity of having one of its best forms of arriving at knowledge as widely…

As parents and students struggle with increasing college costs, one issue receiving considerable attention over the past several years has been the rising price of textbooks. The question of whether a relationship exists between textbook pricing and the overall cost of college has attracted notice from consumer interest groups and, subsequently,…

This article presents an interview with Patrick Sommers, president of reference/information publisher "Gale" (part of Cengage Learning). Sommers took the helm in October 2007, after running system vendor Sirsi beginning in 2001 and engineering both the 2005 merger with Dynix and the 2007 sale of the newly created SirsiDynix to Vista Equity…

This issue of "Research Library Issues" includes the following articles: (1) The University's Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship--A Call to Action; (2) ARL Statement to Scholarly Publishers on the Global Economic Crisis (Karla Hahn); (3) Reinventing Science Librarianship: Themes from the ARL-CNI Forum (Elisabeth Jones); and (4)…

Open source, open content and open access are set to fundamentally alter the conditions of knowledge production and distribution. Open source, open content and open access are also the most tangible result of the shift towards e-science and digital networking. Yet, widespread misperceptions exist about the impact of this shift on knowledge…

As the corpus of gray literature grows and the price of serials rises, it becomes increasingly important to explore ways to integrate the free and open Web seamlessly into one's collections. Users, after all, are discovering these materials all the time via sites such as Google Scholar and Scirus or by searching arXiv.org or CiteSeer directly.…