The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's annual report this year 
features a lengthy essay on the Foundation's initiatives in the 
area of scholarly communications, by Donald J. Waters and Joseph 
S. Meisel.  

"A compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA." Founded by Peter Suber and Robin Peek.

This study explores faculty deposits in
institutional repositories (IR) within selected
disciplines and identifies the diverse navigational
paths to IR sites from library Web site
homepages. The statistical relationship between
the development of an IR and the presence of a
Web site dedicated to the reform of traditional
scholarly communication is also explored. The
implications for the development of institutional
repositories are highlighted.

NSF-funded project managed by Purdue. Simulation tools, presentations/classes, community.

"A considerable portion of the scholarly record is born digital, and some scholarship is produced in digital formats that have no physical, in-the-hand counterparts. The proliferation of digital scholarship raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve it in perpetuity. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship their learning communities produce."

 Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0. A New Wave of Innovation For Teaching and Learning" EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.
pg 33
"The idea dates as far back as the 1960s and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and their ability to learn."
The new ways of using the web are about manipulation of content and participation by readers.
pg 34
Describes the importance of "microcontent" for users, who can move around the web. Microcontent is of course not new, and can be seen to go back to email messages, etc.
Tying the use of microcontent and user participation together with user-created metadata, such as tags and folksonomies. [With all of this microcontent out there to be manipulated, and all of these ways of manipulating it, users need to be able to tag the content with terms to help them retrieve them, as they can not count on remembering which bit of microcentent came from where, etc.]
pg 35 -end.
Introduces and describes delicious, mentioning people connecting to each other through metadata. mentions penntags and h20 and then moves on to wikis and writely.
moves on to blogs and rss, moves on to blog searching, technorati, memeorandom, etc. to digg, ohmynews. then onto sites that let users combine these, like gnosh and rollyo. Raises the question of how universities will deal with this: (Pg 42) "How will colleges and universities consider preserving such small pieces of intellectual work, especially as the works migrate across multiple, shifting, changing platforms?"
Then raises questions about copyright, etc.

Scholarly Communication: Information about journal prices, copyright, open access, and more

Scholarly communication is the lifeblood of the university. The dissemination of knowledge is an imperative of land grant universities like Illinois. Anything that threatens access to, or the free flow of, research and ideas is a threat to the health of the entire system

"ALPSP serves, represents and strengthens the community of not-for-profit publishers, demonstrating their essential role in the future of international academic and professional communication."