Scholarly Ecosystem Collaboration Potentialities: A SAGE White Paper Update

The lifecycle of academic works from idea to investigation -- followed by publication, discovery, access, and usage -- is supported by extensive cross-sector collaboration throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. However, transformational changes occurring worldwide within the knowledge creation and publication landscape have disturbed traditional divisions of labour and established codes of practice. These long-standing conventions and relationships among libraries, publishers, and their respective vendors are now being revisited and renegotiated.

With the aim of furthering collaborative cross-sector conversations, SAGE commissioned a study among scholarly communications ‘value chain’ experts. Results were reported in January 2012 as a white paper titled Improving Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twentieth Century: Collaboration Opportunities for Librarians, Publishers, and Vendors. Since then, various commissioned studies, research reports, journal articles, international standards, conference papers, and white papers have advanced industry standards and demonstrated collaboration possibilities. Now advancements in ‘intelligent tools’ offer further promise for ‘pushing the boundaries’ of knowledge creation through synergistic relationships that enhance not only discoverability of the scholarly corpus, but also its creation, dissemination, navigation, visibility, and usage.