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Scientific Writing for Undergraduate Researchers: OBJECTIVE 6: OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

A Scientific Writing module is designed to increase undergraduate researchers’ knowledge about the key concepts that underpin scholarly communications in STEM-related fields.

OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs." Scholarly communication is frequently defined or depicted as a lifecycle documenting the steps involved in the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of a piece of scholarly research. 

scholarly communications lifecycle

Image Source:  Association of College & Research Libraries: Scholarly Communications Toolkit

There are four considerations that authors of scholarly (academic) writing should give careful attention to:

  • Author’s Rights and Responsibilities - When you decide to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal, you own the full copyrights to that article. If you publish in an open access journal, you retain your full copyrights. However, if you choose to publish in a traditional subscription access journal, you will be required to sign a form transferring some – or all – of your copyrights to that publisher.
  • Fundamentals of U.S. Copyright Law - Under the U.S. Copyright Act, a copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the work (or to authorize others to do so). In the case of sound recordings, the copyright owner has the right to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
  • Overview of Digital Publishing - Digital publishing, also called electronic or online publishing, is the distribution of a variety of online content, such as journals, magazines, newspapers, and eBooks. Through this process, any company or publisher can digitize documents and information that people can view online, download, sometimes manipulate, and even print out or share otherwise, if they choose.
  • Online Scholarly Profiles - 

    Scholarly profiles include both researcher profiles and researcher identifiers. Researcher profiles allow authors to manage their activities and publications, to publicize their work and to network with others scholars.

COMMON METHODS OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Common methods of scholarly communication include publishing peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, academic monographs and books, book reviews and conference papers. Undergraduate researchers traditionally participate in scholarly communications by actively engaging in poster and/or oral presentations at professional conferences.

 

BEFORE YOU GO . . . What have you learned? QUIZ #2