SCI 1

The first three Scholarly Communication Institutes (SCI), 2003-2005, were designed to explore opportunities for advancing innovation in digital scholarly communication and to catalyze digital scholarship and start to build the core infrastructure to support it in the arts and humanities. In 2003, several recognized experts in this arena, from the sciences, arts, and humanities, gathered at Dartmouth College to reflect on progress that had been made over the past two decades and lessons learned, and to identify strategies to enable continued progress particularly in the arts and humanities. The participants focused on a number of barriers to the rapid and broad development of new models for scholarly communication. The serious obstacles are not technological, but rather institutional and cultural. Promotion and tenure committees are uncertain about the value of digital scholarship, copyright laws discourage the use and dissemination of existing scholarship in all formats, and financial, infrastructure, and human support is rarely sufficient, dependable, and ubiquitous across both single and multiple institutions. Further, many arts and humanities scholars do not have deep experience in working in the type of collaborative team so integral to digital scholarship. As a result of the conversations during SCI 1, a focused approach centered on scholarly disciplines and institutional sustainability was pursued for the succeeding two years.