Research and scholarship lead to the generation of new knowledge. The
dissemination of this knowledge has a fundamental impact on the ways
in which society develops and progresses; and at the same time, it
feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as
in so many other areas of human activity, the Internet can change the
way things work: it opens up opportunities for new processes that can
accelerate the growth of knowledge, including the creation of new means
of communicating that knowledge among researchers and within the wider
community.
Two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive
information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more
effective scholarly communication. However, the use of this technology
remains limited; research processes and the dissemination of research
results have yet to fully assimilate the capabilities of the Web and
other digital media. Producers and consumers remain wedded to formats
developed in the era of print publication, and the reward systems for
researchers remain tied to these delivery mechanisms.
Force11 (the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists,
publishers, and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change
toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we
aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through
the the effective use of information technology. \force\ has grown from a
small group of like-minded individuals to an open movement with clearly
identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, polices,
funding mechanisms, and business models. Our foundational assumption is that scholarly communication by means of semantically enhanced media-rich digital publishing are likely to have a greater impact than communication in traditional print media. To date, online
versions of \scare{scholarly outputs} have tended to replicate print
forms rather than exploit the affordances and functionalities of the
digital terrain. The historical limits of print
space provide one reason, amongst others, that traditional journal articles tend to
represent truncated versions of findings. We believe that digital publishing of enhanced papers will enable more effective scholarly communication, which will also broaden to include, for example, the publication of software tools
and communication by means of social media channels.
This document highlights the findings of the Force11 workshop held at
Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011: it summarizes a number of
key problems facing scholarly publishing today and presents a vision that
addresses these problems, proposing concrete steps that key stakeholders
can take to improve the state of scholarly publishing. We invite you to join and contribute to this enterprise.
More about Force11 can be found at http://www.force11.org.