Nature has dedicated a special issue of its weekly publication to exploring The Future of Publishing. The issue looks at OA publication models and arguments, features a Q&A with Robert Darnton, and highlights the role of libraries and information sciences in two articles:
Richard Monastersky’s news feature, “Publishing frontiers: The library reboot,” considers the role of the library in this publishing revolution, seeking more active engagement and integration with the scholarly research process:
Libraries are looking to assist with all stages of research, by offering guidance and tools for collecting, exploring, visualizing, labelling and sharing data. “I see us moving up the food chain and being co-contributors to the creation of new knowledge,” says Sarah Thomas, the head of libraries at the University of Oxford, UK.
- In “Scholarship: Beyond the paper,” Altmetrics evangelist Jason Priem discusses an sea change in scholarly communication with the advent of the Internet. Of note is his description of modern certification of scholarly work, which takes in our own dh+lib review model of bringing news to the surface through aggregation, nomination, and curation:
The Journal of Digital Humanities, for example, does not take submissions; rather, it highlights the best content already published online, often pulling from relatively obscure blogs and web pages. Importantly, this selection process relies heavily on altmetrics (such as number of page views, tweets and trackbacks) as a first-pass filter before manual curation.