The George Washington University

Scholarly Communication

Definitions

Scholarly Communication

One of the better definitions of scholarly communication can be found on the website of the Bernard Becker Medical Library of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.
According to that site, Scholarly Communication is "the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavors. Among the many scholarly communications issues include author rights, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing including open access, institutional repositories, rights and access to federally funded research, and preservation of intellectual assets."<
The George Washington University is exploiting its consortial implementation of DSpace, an institutional repository tool, to provide just such an alternative publishing platform for our faculty, research staff, and students to allow them to broadly disseminate intellectual content which may or may not be able to find a home in more traditional academic journals or are in electronic formats not compatible with traditional print publication.