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Scholarly Communications & Publishing

Have questions about writing, citing, submitting, publishing, or sharing your scholarly work? This guide can help!

Scholarship as a Conversation

In 2003, ACRL defined 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." 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. 

scholarly communications lifecycle

Scholarly Communications & Publishing Vocabulary

  • ACRL: The Association of College & Research Libraries
  • Altmetrics: The practice of tracking mentions in social, online, and traditional popular media to determine the impact of a scholarly work
  • Author addendum: A document that you can add to your publishing agreement to help you retain additional copyright-related permissions.
  • Authors’ rights: The copyright-related permissions that an author retains after signing a publishing agreement
  • Bibliometrics: The practice of tracking citations to determine the impact of a scholarly work
  • Data management: Strategies for storing data in ways that make it easy to use and protect confidentiality
  • Digital humanities: The practice of applying computational tools and methods to humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy
  • Digital preservation: Practices ensuring that digital information remains accessible regardless of technology changes over time
  • Literature review: A critical analysis of existing scholarship around a subject
  • Open access: A descriptor applied to journals that can be read without purchasing a subscription
  • Scholarly communications: The network created by scholars through conversation in journals and other scholarly channels
  • Zotero: Free, open-source software for keeping track of your information sources and generating citations