LIBER Quarterly publishes special issue on “Research data and new forms of scholarly communication”

LIBER Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal managed by LIBER (the Association of European Research Libraries), has just published a special issue on research data and new forms of scholarly communication.

In the editorial, the guest editors of this special issue, Donatella Castelli and Wolfram Horstmann, emphasised  that

[…] researchers have realized that the current scholarly communication model, based exclusively on articles, is inherently limited and inefficient, even when all articles are in digital form and accessible through the Web. Communication is effective if and only if the recipient of the information, who is often not known beforehand, can comprehend, scrutinize, challenge and reproduce the findings presented.

The two editors believe that we’re currently at the beginning of a revolutionary process that transforms scholarly communication. According to Castelli and Horstman supporting this change requires a deep re-thinking of organizational models, technological solutions and policies.

The special issue of LIBER quarterly is dedicated to providing insights into the challenges involved in this transformation and into solutions designed and implemented.

Fortunately the EDaWaX project also contributed an article to this special issue. Prof. Gert G. Wagner and myself summarized the findings of an analysis among scientific infrastructure service providers (mainly from Germany but also from other European countries). These service providers have been evaluated with regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data in the field of social sciences, especially economics.  The conclusion of our paper discusses the roles and responsibilities of several stakeholders for operating data archives for scholarly journals. Experiences in other scientific areas are integrated in our suggestions for establishing data archives that are based on the complementary know-how of research data centres (RDCs) and libraries.