Canada invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year in research at its higher education institutions. But despite a growing public policy emphasis on research in Canada, scant attention has been paid to the development of a coordinated approach for its dissemination.
This disconnect was the impetus for a three-year study initiated and partially funded by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The study’s findings, Towards an Integrated Knowledge Ecosystem: A Canadian Research Strategy, describe the current state of scholarly communication in Canada, the drivers transforming it, and propose a Canadian strategy to facilitate the adaptation of the scholarly communication system.
Not surprisingly, the study shows that technology was the most influential factor impacting the dissemination of research.
New technologies are radically changing the modes of research communication, speeding up the research process and facilitating new types of research, but other interconnected factors, such as public policy, the commercialization of research, changing research patterns and the economics of scholarly publishing, are also contributing to the transformation of knowledge dissemination.
This rapidly transforming environment presents a whole host of issues for those involved in the dissemination of research, including publishers, librarians and the academic research community, and is challenging the very nature of traditional activities and strategies for managing research output, such as long-term preservation.
While this was relatively easily fulfilled in the print world, it presents a number of complex issues in the new digital environment. Both hardware and software face rapid obsolescence and much primary information that is now “born digital” is likely to be made inaccessible by technological advances.
The Canadian academic journal scene is another area that could benefit from a national strategy. Many Canadian journals have not yet converted to electronic formats, and the ones that have are reporting varying degrees of success.
The growing public policy emphasis on research as an economic commodity is again another area where a national perspective is needed. In many cases, commercialization of research results means bypassing the publication process and transferring the ownership for intellectual property from the individual researcher to private industry. This shift from knowledge as a public good to its commodification is changing the nature of how knowledge is generated, distributed and used, and may ultimately contribute to a shrinking of the “information commons.”
Evidence is growing that domestic stakeholders of scholarly resources face key challenges in this new environment. In a knowledge society, where the dissemination of research is as important as its generation, it is critical that Canada respond quickly to this transformation of knowledge dissemination.
The report recommends the development of “a coherent national policy of knowledge preservation and dissemination” in order to “create greater cohesion, accessibility, security and access to research findings.”
Without such a strategy, Canada is in danger of falling behind other countries in research production and its efficient dissemination.
Kathleen Shearer and William Birdsall, two of the study’s authors and research associates with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, contibuted to this article.