Scholarly communication can be thought of as the system through which research and scholarship is Created, Evaluated, Distributed, and Preserved. Facilitating the dissemination of scholarly writings means having to consider issues like:
- What models or platforms exist for the funding, distribution, and discovery of scholarship?
- How are these publications evaluated or measured for impact?
- Who has access to creating and reading publications, and how is access provided? What access barriers exist?
- Who “owns” or controls the content, and how can the content be used?
While academia and academic publishing is slow, and theses and scholarly societies and their publications have been around for hundreds of years, reading habits, the global and interdisciplinary nature of research, and the digital age means the answers to all of these questions are changing. SCS assists scholars in navigating this developing field. We aim to support effective, efficient, sustainable, and economically viable systems for the creation, discovery, dissemination, and preservation of scholarship—particularly through systems that provide barrier-free access to quality information.