Abstract
There are few people who would claim that the current scholarly communication landscape is sustainable, but the pathway forward to a new scholarly communication paradigm appears so mired in tradition, the status quo and vested interests that it seems impossible to imagine what the future norms will be. Using future scenarios as a tool, perhaps it is possible to jump forward to potential future outcomes and work backwards to construct what those pathways may have been. My talk will present three future scenarios for scholarly
communication and discuss the potential impacts of each for academic libraries and publishing. The first future scenario is one which leverages print-on-demand to create just-in-time library collection development. Digital printing offers publishers alternative economic models which can decrease risk while increasing profitability. But while some of the costs of
publication can be removed entirely from the production chain, others are shifted to libraries and their users. The second scenario assumes that the legal barriers to the Google Book project are resolved. Google and other major content vendors utilize micro-payments and disaggregate scholarly publications such that libraries are displaced from their role as cooperative
purchasing agents on behalf of their academic communities. In contrast, the third scenario significantly increases the role of academic libraries in scholarly communication. Scholarship has pushed
beyond the confines of textual presentation such that books and articles can no longer serve as adequate vehicles of scholarship.
Scholarly societies take on the peer-review, quality control role, but it falls to libraries, not publishers, to provide access and active, long-term preservation of these new objects. The focus of university presses are reposition into their host institutions such that many return to their original missions of acting for the express purpose of disseminating the research conducted by their local faculty. It is clear that publishing and academic libraries are on the precipice of a dramatic paradigm shift. In 10 or 15 years time, we will likely
find that all three of these scenarios are off the mark, but in many ways the exercise of imagining potential futures is more important than the accuracy of the end product.