Welcome to the Scholarly Communications Research Guide

This guide is designed to provide information about Scholarly Communications.

After reviewing this guide you will be able to:

• define scholarly communications
• identify publishing resources
• recognize predatory publishing warning signs
• define Open Access

What is Scholarly Communication?

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) defines scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs." (ACRL, 2003)

Scholarly communication is frequently defined or depicted as a lifecycle documenting the steps involved in the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of a piece of scholarly research. There are several actors or stakeholders present at the various stages in this lifecycle, including researchers, peer reviewers, publishers, and libraries. (ACRL, 2021)

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Image adapted from "The Publication Cycle" by University of Winnipeg Libraries and is licensed CC  BY 4.0.
Information adapted from the "Scholarly Communication Toolkit" by ACRL and is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

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