The Brave New World of Scholarly Repositories

The manner in which scholarly research is conducted is changing rapidly. This is most evident in Science and Engineering, but similar revolutionary trends are becoming apparent across disciplines. Improvements in computing and network technologies, digital data capture techniques, and powerful data mining techniques enable research practices that are highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive. These dramatic changes in the nature of scholarly research require corresponding fundamental changes in scholarly communication. The established scholarly communication system has not kept pace with these revolutionary changes in research practice and has not capitalized on the immense capabilities offered by the digital, networked environment. In essence, the current electronic scholarly communication system is a scanned copy of its paper-based predecessor upon which a thin layer of cross-venue interoperability has been overlaid. The time has come to design and deploy the innately digital scholarly communication system that scholars deserve, and that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time.