Decades of investment and development in information technologies and networked information resources have created an unprecedented opportunity for scholars to express, document, organize, and transmit knowledge with extraordinary flexibility, depth, and power; these same developments have made it possible for this knowledge to be accessible throughout our society and globally at manageable costs.  Yet, these opportunities are constrained by publishing, tenure, and promotion policies based on historic practices.

 

Universities and their communities need to capture the full value of the growing investments in research and scholarship by maximizing the dissemination of their products.  Research investments come from many sources, including federal funding agencies and private foundations, but universities themselves also make substantial contributions.  These investments are made based on an expectation that research findings will be broadly available for use in advancing research, teaching, and in advancing the public good.  Dissemination of research is a key value of the academy.  Indeed, academic freedom encompasses the rights of faculty members and researchers to communicate freely and broadly the conclusions of their scholarly endeavors.

 

Traditional dissemination practices have largely relied on outsourcing production of print artifacts paid for by transfer of copyright to publishers.  The assumption has been that broad dissemination required the total concession of copyrights in return for the substantial and unique investments publishers made in producing publications.  Yet, there is an inherent difficulty with relying on market forces alone to maximize dissemination.  In the emerging electronic environment, there are new opportunities to increase access to new knowledge and far less need to rely on models that demand exclusive distribution rights.  Traditional publishing and distribution routes can and will adapt as they are supplemented by new forms of university-based dissemination.  For an appropriate transition to occur, however, universities must retain the ability to ensure broad distribution of research and scholarship.

 

Another key value of the academy is preservation of access to research and scholarship over time.  We must retain the rights to preserve products of faculty work within the academy or decisions about what will be saved and who will be able to use it again will reside outside the academy.

 

To realize the benefits of this changing landscape, promotion and tenure criteria need to continue their evolution beyond their basis in historic practices that often tied faculty rewards exclusively to publication in the traditional journal and monograph vehicles.  While the identification of high quality scholarship is integral to the academy’s work, basing rewards on use of the historic, print-based distribution system retards the development of new models and also strengthens the ability of actors outside the academy to control future dissemination of new knowledge.

 

Reflecting the need to retain the ability to ensure that faculty scholarship and creative work is broadly available, universities, working with their own faculty, should supplement traditional publishing models with more effective models over time.  While such models must preserve the critical qualitative components of traditional publishing, they can and should go beyond them by adopting the benefits made possible by the networked environment.  Assistance in these tasks should be solicited from scholarly societies and university presses.

 

In a networked environment one maximizes technology investments by integrating dissemination functions directly into existing university technology environments.  A variety of capabilities for disseminating content already exists on campuses, often under the management of libraries or information technology units.  With appropriate rights management strategies, these can be effectively harnesses to substantially enhance dissemination of research and scholarship in the present and into the future.