The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices

We have examined academic values as they influence publishing choices and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. Direct interviews were carried out with relevant stakeholders — faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors — in five fields: anthropology, biostatistics, chemical engineering, English-language literature and the intersection of law and economics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty values and publishing practices, and indeed in underlying the entire system of research evaluation. There is much more experimentation with regard to means of communication while research is in progress, for which single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition, than there is for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to move faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, final publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas. We are pursuing that line of approach in further work.