Role of university libraries in scholarly communication system

Article Review

3. Rao (2009) discusses the role of academic libraries in disseminating scholarly information and explores the possibility of librarians acting as partners in electronic publishing and self archiving of the university’s research output. At present the academic and research community is faced with a new challenge of communicating their research to others directly over the World Wide Web. Although electronic journals have been in existence since 1976, full fledged e-journals came into limelight only in the 1990s. One study identified 30 scholarly e-journals in 1991, which by 1997 have increased to 2500.  the cost of journal is increasing day by day. The average increase in journals cost is estimated to be around 8% per year. At the same time, rarely do academics and scientists receive any remuneration for scientific articles published in journals. The commercial publishers are not willing to share their profits with the ‘creators’ of information. So far so good, with the learned societies, who are prepared to pass on the benefits of electronic information to the creators. It is also noticed that various publishers are coming together and interlinking their databases through third party ‘aggregators’ so that the user can access all these databases by subscribing to any one vendor.                                             

Some libraries like, Highwire Press, a division of Stanford University Libraries, which publish life-science journals, provide free access to most back issues of its publications and some current journals. University librarians have already accepted the role of publishers by maintaining copies of open access journals under the banner of institutional repositories, which might lead to a transformation of the scholarly communication system itself. Further the availability of free online journal publishing software enabled everyone to publish journals online. The internet revolution has partly given the ‘power’ back to scientists, universities and leaned societies. Publishing in e-journals is gaining recognition and momentum with the inclusion of the reference or peer review system by major publishers.               

Koteswara Rao, M (2009). Academic Publishing: Role of university libraries in scholarly communication system. Proceedings of International Conference on Academic Libraries, India, University of Delhi,