The Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting a major multi-year study of how faculty needs and research practices shape their choices about scholarly communication. The final report on this work is now available, as described in the announcement copied below. In my view, this is a very important look at where faculty thinking and practice stands in regard to the changing scholarly communication environment, including a  sensitive examination of differences across disciplines. We've been fortunate to have updates on this work at some of the CNI member meetings, and I hope to be able to host a report on this most current work in the near future.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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We are delighted to announce the publication of the final report:
Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.

The full report can be accessed at: http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication.

The final report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. Our premise has always been that disciplinary conventions matter and that social realities (and individual personality) will dictate how new practices, including those under the rubric of Web 2.0 or cyberinfrastructure, are adopted by scholars. That is, the academic values embodied in disciplinary cultures, as well as the interests of individual players, have to be considered when envisioning new schemata for the communication of scholarship at its various stages.

Links to the complete results of our ongoing work can be found at the Future of Scholarly Communication's project website.

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Diane Harley, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project,
Center for Studies in Higher Education
771 Evans Hall, # 4650
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/people/dharley.htm
scproject@berkeley.edu