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The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.

This article explores the relationship between scholarly communication, an established research area receiving renewed interest, and digital libraries, a relatively new area of research. Scholarship is inherently a social process and it is embedded in a structure of relationships with other scholars, with scholarly societies, and with publishers and libraries. These stakeholders agree that the relationship has become unbalanced with the advent of electronic publishing, digital libraries, computer networks and associated changes in pricing, intellectual property policies and contracts, but they do not agree on solutions to redress the balance. Several problems worthy of research lie at the intersection of scholarly communication processes and digital libraries. These include the ability of digital libraries to support the cycle of information seeking, using and creating; the ‘social life’ of documents; and electronic publishing. Other interesting problems exist at the intersection of structures of scholarly communication and digital libraries. These include increased interdependency of scholarly documents, as links are embedded between documents, both within and between digital libraries; the indefinite preservation of digital documents; business models for electronic publishing and digital libraries; and conflicts between the physical and virtual aspects of libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study to investigate the changes in scholarly communication practices among a group of scholars in the UK and build upon the results that were published in a previous paper.

The study deployed a naturalistic inquiry approach using semi-structured interviews as a qualitative research tool. A sample of 40 participants from four UK universities was interviewed to explore the changes in informal scholarly communication behaviour.

The analysis of the interviews revealed that there are three ideal types of behaviour: the “orthodox” uses formal and traditional scholarly communication approaches; the “moderate” prioritises formal communication approaches, but at the same time is trying to get benefits from informal channels; and, the “Heterodox” uses all channels available in the scholarly communication.

The value of the current study lies in using a naturalistic inquiry approach to investigate the changes in scholarly communication practices, and to explore the different scholarly communication styles. In the context of this study, the use of a naturalistic approach and grounded theory principles in connection with coding provided a stance that allows for the gathering of rich information to enable understanding and explanation of scholarly communication activities in addition to uncovering themes that related to scholarly behaviour.

The focus of this paper is to study the influence of social media on scholarly communication. The aim is to provide an overview of researchers' use of Web 2.0 techniques, and discuss a possible change of information behaviors in the context of scholarly communication.

A web survey was distributed to a targeted sample of university staff (professors, teachers, researchers, and doctoral students). SPSS was utilized as a main tool to synthesize and analyze data, and present the results.

Web 2.0 tools are well‐known to researchers. Most researchers are familiar with blogs, wikis, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online document. Social media provide a convenient environment for scholarly communication. Depending on different aims within the scholarly communication process, researchers choose appropriate modes of communication in their research work.

A combination of content analysis with survey and/or interviews may highlight other aspects of Web 2.0, which is not possible using a single method of content analysis.

There are few studies on the changes of scholarly communication in the context of Web 2.0. This study provides new insights for exploring the effects of Web 2.0 tools on scholarly communication and the development of new information behavior to match the scholarly environment of social media. This understanding can aid the researchers to keep abreast of new characteristics of scholarly communication and help the librarians to develop the correlative services in the scholarly environment of social media.

The purpose of this paper is to lay a theoretical foundation for identifying operational information units for library and information professional activities in the context of scholarly communication.

The study adopts a deduction-verification approach to formulate a typology of units for scholarly information. It first deduces possible units from an existing conceptualization of information, which defines information as the combined product of data and meaning, and then tests the usefulness of these units via two empirical investigations, one with a group of scholarly papers and the other with a sample of scholarly information users.

The results show that, on defining an information unit as a piece of information that is complete in both data and meaning, to such an extent that it remains meaningful to its target audience when retrieved and displayed independently in a database, it is then possible to formulate a hierarchical typology of units for scholarly information. The typology proposed in this study consists of three levels, which in turn, consists of 1, 5 and 44 units, respectively.

The result of this study has theoretical implications on both the philosophical and conceptual levels: on the philosophical level, it hinges on, and reinforces the objective view of information; on the conceptual level, it challenges the conceptualization of work by IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Library Reference Model but endorses that by Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME 2.0 model.

It calls for reconsideration of existing operational units in a variety of library and information activities.

The study strengthens the conceptual foundation of operational information units and brings to light the primacy of “one work” as an information unit and the possibility for it to be supplemented by smaller units.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of reading in scholarly work among academics in Finland. This study analyzes readings from a variety of publication types including books, conference proceedings, research reports, magazines, newspapers, blogs, non-fiction and fiction.

An online survey was developed and distributed in Finland in 2016–2017 (n=528). Participants were asked their finding and use of scholarly information resources of all types.

Scholars read from a variety of publications. Different types of publications are read and used differently. Reading also varies between disciplines, ranks, work responsibilities and type of research performed.

The study was a nationwide study of researchers in Finland; therefore, all findings are within the context of researchers in a single country. All results are self-reported; therefore, the authors assume but cannot be sure that respondents accurately recollect the specifics of their use of scholarly information.

The results of this study are relevant to publishers, research librarians, editors and others who serve consumers of scholarly information resources, design information products and services for those scholars, and seek to better understand the information needs and use of a variety of types of scholarly publications.

This study replicates previous studies in a variety of countries and provides a more up-to-date and single-country contextualized overview of how researchers find and use scholarly information in their work.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship.

The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial – and considerably extended – basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication.

The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not for, scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper.

The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary.

This study aims to accomplish three objectives: first, to investigate the role and impact of information and communication technologies on the practice of science in the UK; second, to examine and characterise changes in scholarly communication activities such as information seeking, publishing and collaboration; and third, to investigate the validity of the current scholarly communication models and to determine whether there is a need for a new model.

The study deployed a naturalistic inquiry approach using semi-structured interviews as a qualitative research tool. A theoretical sample of 40 researchers in four universities were interviewed to gather data regarding informal scholarly communication practices, factors that affect the researchers’ decisions and changes in the scholarly communication system.

The results of the interviews suggest that there are three types of scholars who engage in scholarly communication activities. First, the “orthodox scholar”, who only uses formal and traditional scholarly communication approaches. Second, the “moderate scholar”, who prioritises formal communication approaches but, at the same time, is trying to get benefits from informal channels. Finally, the “heterodox scholar”, who uses all channels available in scholarly communication. The study also proposes a model of scholarly communication that reflects the current changes in scholarly research.

The paper describes the changes in informal scholarly communication practices in four universities in the UK. However, because the study used a naturalistic inquiry approach, the results cannot be generalised to a different population.

There is limited literature investigating the changes in informal scholarly communication practices. The value of the current study lies in being the first study in this area that uses a naturalistic inquiry approach to investigate the changes in informal scholarly communication practices, and to develop a new model of scholarly communication.

The semantic web gives meaning to information so that humans and computers can work together better. Ontology is used to represent knowledge on the semantic web. Web services have been introduced to make the knowledge conveyed by the ontology on the semantic web accessible across different applications. This paper seeks to present the use of these latest advances in the context of a scholarly semantic web (or SSWeb) system, which can support advanced search functions such as expert finding and trend detection in addition to basic functions such as document and author search as well as document and author clustering search.

A distributed architecture of the proposed SSWeb is described, as well as semantic web services that support scholarly information retrieval on the SSWeb.

Initial experimental results indicate that the proposed method is effective.

The work reported is experimental in nature. More work is needed, but early results are encouraging and the authors wish to make their work known to the research community by publishing this paper so that further progress can be made in this area of research.

The work is presented in the context of scholarly document retrieval, but it could also be adapted to other types of documents, such as medical records, machine‐fault records and legal documents. This is because the basic principles are the same.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the aptness of “information literacy”, conceptualized as a socially contextualized phenomenon, for analyses of interdisciplinary scholarly communication.

The paper presents a conceptual analysis. Two influential representatives of the social turn in the information literacy literature are taken as starting points: Annemaree Lloyd’s conceptualization of “information literacy practice”, and Jack Andersen’s conceptualization of information literacy as “genre knowledge”. Their positioning of information literacy as a socially contextualized phenomenon – by use of practice theories and rhetorical genre theory, respectively, – is analysed against an illustrative example of interdisciplinary scholarly communication.

Conceptualizations by Lloyd and Andersen explain information literacy as socially contextualized in terms of stable norms and understandings shared in social communities. Their concepts have the potential of explaining changes and innovations in social practices including scholarly communication. If we combine genre-theoretical and practice-theoretical concepts – and accentuate the open-endedness of social practices and of genres – we can enhance the understanding of information literacy in settings of interdisciplinary scholarly communication where the actors involved lack shared conventions and assumptions.

The paper suggests that the fluid features of social contexts should be accounted for in the information literacy literature. By combining genre-theoretical and practice-theoretical concepts in a novel way it offers such an account. It provides a useful framework for understanding the phenomenon of information literacy in interdisciplinary scholarly communication.