SCI 8: July 14-16, 2010
Experimental Approaches to New-Model Scholarly Communication

With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) began in 2003 with the goal of providing an opportunity for scholars and leaders in scholarly disciplines and societies, academic libraries, information technology, and higher education administration to design, test, and implement strategies that advance the humanities through the use of innovative technologies. Each Institute explores scholarly communication through a focus on one or more of four core topics:

• scholarly practices—the research, analysis, presentation, vetting, publication, and teaching by which scholars advance knowledge and inquiry;
• organizational models—the departments, disciplines, learned societies, and humanities research centers that act as sites of scholarly practices;
• infrastructure—the human and technical capacities that support scholarship locally and among institutions; and
• modes of working—the methods of inquiry that emerge from use of new technologies, such as collaborative investigation, virtual modeling, and Web-based informal discourse; and, recursively, how these new modes affect scholarly behaviors, organizational models, and infrastructure.

SCI 8 will explore forms of publication that take advantage of new affordances of digital technologies, both for research and for representing knowledge. The meeting, to convene at the University of Virginia July 14-16, 2010, will gather scholars experimenting with new venues for the dissemination and assessment
of scholarship online. The goal of this Institute will be to identify the publishing needs of such scholars and to articulate the new forms of scholarly publishing—beyond digital versions of analog monographs and journals— suitable for their work. Though we are not focusing on issues of validating and credentialing per se, we shall address them as appropriate, understanding that publishers rely on a community of expert scholars to determine what scholarship merits publication.

Topics to be addressed in this session may include:

• the nature of scholarly argumentation in online publication
• strategies for representing temporally or spatially dynamic arguments and their underlying sources
• the nature of expert communities best positioned to review such scholarship
• the changing roles and responsibilities of scholars and their professional societies, librarians, and publishers in new-model scholarly publishing

The outcome of SCI 8 will be an articulation of one or more models of publishing that meet the criteria developed by SCI participants, as well as identification of those scholars and professional societies, librarians, and publishers who are ready to develop these models.

SCI is designed to frame a set of meaningful questions that lead to a plan for further action. Participants will convene for two full days in plenary and small group discussions, with ample occasion for informal discussions and to include time in the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab to explore key methodical questions in the context of ongoing research projects. The meeting will result in an action agenda, and SCI leadership will follow up over the following 12 months to advance activities identified by the participants.

SCI Background

From its inception, SCI has focused on cultivating leadership and encouraging and enabling the integration of new technologies into scholarship. SCI 1 assembled a group of pioneers in digital scholarly communication to review progress over the last two decades and lessons learned, and to identify strategies for continuing progress in the arts and humanities. The reflections of SCI 1 participants set the stage for following institutes. These Institutes have focused on several scholarly disciplines, the nature and potential of collaborative working structures, critical questions surrounding the use of new media technologies to advance scholarship in unique and innovative ways, and the institutional infrastructure essential to enable digital scholarly communication.

SCI leadership is committed to assisting participants develop real and reasonable goals that can be accomplished. Theoretical and practical discussions are designed to lead to an action agenda. To this end, SCI have worked closely with scholars and their partners from previous Institutes including practical ethicists, architectural historians, visual studies scholars, and leading humanities research centers. Additional information on the Scholarly Communication Institute can be found at http://www.uvasci.org/.