This document contains five sections. Section \ref{sec:vision} presents our vision of the future of scholarly publishing. In Section \ref{sec:issues}, we outline six key problems that prevent scholarly communication from achieving its full potential. Section \ref{sec:strategies} contains six specific recommendations for actions to address these problems. Section \ref{sec:pointers} offers a dynamic list of pointers to relevant research reports and related projects. Finally, in Section \ref{sec:steps} we describe what we are doing to implement these recommendations.
The problems and recommendations we perceive can be grouped into two groups, each containing three principal themes:
Themes 1–3 concern the format and technologies of scholarly publication: how scholarly data, information, and knowledge are (or could be) represented; how readers, users, authors, editors and computers can interact with these representations; and how different knowledge representations could be combined, queried, stored and otherwise treated.
Themes 4–6 concern the enterprise of scholarly publishing, including business models and the attribution of credit. In these sections we discuss how scholarship is evaluated, accredited and monetized; current and new models and modes of assigning copyright and intellectual property rights; the financial aspects of scholarly publishing; and the mechanisms for assessing the quality and value of researchers and their research outputs, and of attributing credit and worth to them.
The problems relating to these six themes are described in Section 2, while our recommendations for their solutions are described in Section 3. These problems and recommendations are summarized in the following table.
| Formats and Technologies | |
| Problems | Recommendations |
| \ref{sec:issues-exp} Existing formats needlessly limit, inhibit and undermine effective knowledge transfer | \ref{sec:strats-exp} Rethink the unit and form of the scholarly publication |
| \ref{sec:issues-inf} Improved knowledge dissemination mechanisms produce information overload | \ref{sec:strats-inf} Develop tools and technologies that better support the scholarly lifecycle |
| \ref{sec:issues-data} Claims are hard to verify and results are hard to reuse | \ref{sec:strats-data} Add data, software, and workflows into the publication as first-class research objects |
| Business Models and Attribution of Credit | |
| Problems | Recommendations |
| \ref{sec:issues-acc} There is a tension between commercial publishing and the provision of unfettered access to scholarly information | \ref{sec:strats-acc} Derive new financially sustainable models of open access |
| \ref{sec:issues-bus} Traditional business models of publishing are being threatened | \ref{sec:strats-bus} Derive new business models for science publishers and libraries |
| \ref{sec:issues-ass} Current academic assessment models don’t adequately measure the merit of scholars and their work over the full breadth of their research outputs | \ref{sec:strats-ass} Derive new methods and metrics for evaluating quality and impact that extend beyond traditional print outputs to embrace the new technologies |