A Model of Scholarly Communication in Tourism and an Open Access Initiative

Tourism research has reached a mature stage indicated by the rising number of journals and citation patterns inside the tourism field. However, many challenges exist including the irrelevancy of tourism research to practitioners, increasing subscription cost of academic journals, the long delay in publishing research results, and academic institutions’ limited budget. Academic institutions are also facing the academic publishing paradox in that they are forced to pay high costs to have access to the research results their own scholars produced. The author argues that printed journals as one type of materialization of scholarly communication alone could not fulfill the growing needs for faster scholarly communication and knowledge creation in tourism field. Either in physical or digital form, tourism publications is merely material manifestation of a complex network of collaborative activity of tourism researchers that comprises discovery, ideation, and research of tourism knowledge. Thus, the author provides a model of scholarly publishing in tourism field and promotes the adoption of open-source and open-access scholarly communication among tourism researchers. All materialization of formal and informal communication between tourism scholars should be captured, stored, and disseminated. An open access and open source tourism journal will facilitate future mature of tourism field and speed up the tourism knowledge dissemination. However, the value of this open-source journal will largely depend on the willingness of the participants in the system, publishers, scholars, academic institutions, funding institutions, and others, to adopt new forms of knowledge creation and discovery.